Being Engaged, Not Informed: French “Orientalists” Revisited

The relationship between West and East—in both in colonial and post-colonial periods—is anything other than a one-directional relationship. Rather it is shaped by a constant circulation and a steady swap not only of human beings, animals, goods, diseases and technologies but also of social, cultural and political practices and concepts. These processes are characterized by permanently validating and deprecatory translations of the meaning and the function of those ideas, concepts and strategies in circulation. Thus, disbanding the all too dull dichotomous, static and essentialist analysis of the relationship between the East and West opens new ways to approach the visual representation of the “Western Orient”. Aspects and mechanisms of self-orientalization within Western culture are negotiated in which the representation of music seems to have played an important role as evidenced by their strong presence in Western visual representations and visions of the “Orient”. Taking into account this perspective the paper explores the topic of the “Western Orient” with a special emphasis on the function of representations of music based on both the close reading and the analysis of the embodied narratives in visual instances.