"He Has Made the Dry Bones Live": Orientalism's Attempted Resuscitation of Eastern Christianity

While there has been much scholarship on Orientalism in relation to Islam and other non-Christian religions, the relationship between Orientalism and Eastern forms of Christianity has rarely received any scholarly attention. Late nineteenth and early twentieth-century scholarship and travel writing from the United States and Britain contain countless descriptions of Eastern Christianity that make use of Orientalist tropes, but also attempt to reconcile what the authors saw as two mutually exclusive categories: Oriental and Christian. This article argues that the rhetoric employed in these accounts portrays Eastern Christianity using somatic language as a body that paradoxically lies between life (Christianity) and death (the Orient), and can only be resuscitated by Western intervention.