After the success of our Summer Symposium BSU ResNet is now looking forward to building the network, hosting a new seminar series and a range of social events in the new academic year. This will be our 2nd year and there are plenty of developments at the University to discuss which will help decide how our future will be shaped.

You can download  our October Resnet Reader from our ‘Reader‘ page, which includes a report on the events of our first year, including our Symposium, and a guide to our plans for this coming year.  These will be updated on the ‘Events‘ page of our website soon.

Obviously many of you will be aware that the Graduate School has moved from Newton Park to Corsham Court, so this year we intend to spread our activities around the various facilities at Bath Spa (including Sion Hill) and perhaps outside of the University too.

We look forward to meeting any new students and we hope you can join us and start contributing to the network. If you would like to contribute any material to this website please do not hesitate to get in touch and sign up to edublogs here. We also encourage you to create your own academia.edu profile (like mine here:http://bathspa.academia.edu/HenryKnight), which we can link to our profiles page here.

Get in contact with us whenever you like, our contact details are here and our general email is resnetbathspa@hotmail.com

Pictures will be posted soon.

Please write any feedback here.

http://bsuresnet.edublogs.org/events/resnet-annual-symposium-2009/

Sessions will be run simultaneously.

This blogsite has been set up as a tool to help everyone involved with Resnet, or even vaguely associated with research at Bath Spa, put out their ideas in whatever format the internet will allow. This might be to attract interest from people within or outside of the university, self-promotional, or for simply testing out an idea. The content does not have to be publishable, peer-reviewed or a ‘finished product’, it can be whatever you want.

My own example posted below was done in about 3 to 4 hours and was designed to help me think through a couple of my own philisophical questions; about Orientalism in particular relation to a key figure in the area of history I am studying. ANY feedback is welcome, no matter how short or even disparaging. The big mistake I made was probably in trying to make it look somehow ‘official’, perhaps making it seem like you had to read the book to have any valid response. This is not the case. I do not suggest that is a model of what should be put up, it is just one of many possibilities for what you might like to post.

Seriously, anything is welcome. If you haven’t mastered the basics of blog-posting, do not hesitate to email me the content, and I will arrange it for you. This will not be too much of a burden on my time, I have little better to do than help make this site better and hopefully allow it to make our general PhD experience better too.

Best,

Henry.

Pallavi Pandit Laisram, Viewing the Islamic Orient: British Travel Writers of the Nineteenth Century, Routledge, London, 2006. Available online and from the British Library.

“The experience of travel in the Orient made some popular travel writers – James Morier, Alexander Kinglake, Richard Burton, and Gertrude Bell… Even as they subscribed to a reductive view of the Orient, their personal encounter with the “other” and the physical and psychological displacement caused by their travel experience led them to question and challenge their culture’s assumptions of the Orient.”

As hinted at in the blurb above, Pallavi Pandit Laisram’s analysis seeks a textured, non-binary analysis of a varied cast of British travel writers, unified by their elite status and fascination with the “Orient”. Laisram’s work is heavily influenced by the American/Palestinian scholar, Edward Said’s arguments, sometimes at the risk of becoming monothematic. So whilst what constitutes the term “Other” is not made specifically clear, it is rooted within the Saidian discourse on Orientalism, and thus defined as, essentially, those not conforming to the culture of the dominant world power. In broader terms, this becomes the distinction between East and West. Whilst not wanting to make this article an insignificant review of ‘Orientalism’ it is important to have some understanding of Said’s ideological framework. The following was written by Said in the 2003 Preface to his original 1978 work Orientalism, right before he sadly passed away:

What our [Western] leaders and their intellectual lackeys seem incapable of understanding is that history cannot be swept clean like a blackboard, clean so that “we” might impose our own forms of life for these lesser people to follow… [People from] the “Orient”, that semi-mythical construct which since Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in the late eighteenth century has been made and remade countless times by power, acting through an expedient form of knowledge to assert that this [inferiority/baseness] is the Orient’s nature, and we must deal with it accordingly.[1]

Laisram is essentially examining the British “remake” of the Orient, through the height of their imperial dominance during the nineteenth century. This is done with a particular focus on how the individual traveller, or ‘Orientalist’, might become detached from their unconscious task of cultural dominance. In the opening chapter the significant theme of Laisram’s attempt at an equality of understanding is explained. Laisram deals with the problem of some critics ‘Occidentalising’ the ‘Orientalist’, by making “generalisations about the Western perception of the Orient.”[2] However, strong themes emerge throughout the bulk of the book, most notably the incredible faith in “Western power” and its rightful place in history. This was best expressed by Hegel in his Philosophy of History. Hegel argued that there was a Historical spirit which had manifested in “the European world forming itself anew – the nations taking root there, to produce a world of free reality expanded and developed in every direction.”[3] This was as his historical ‘Spirit’ had left Islam for the “Osman race” to have dominion over; a civilisation where “no moral principle remained in men’s souls.”[4]

This sentiment has powerful reverberation in the Alexander Kinglake that Laisram describes, particularly in Eothen (1844), which she describes as a “high spirited, witty and arrogant account of approximately a year’s adventure in the Ottoman Empire.”[5] Kinglake describes the East as; “a decrepit world … Whereas the West is the future that has no End.”[6] Laisram’s conclusion that Kinglake “chose to write a book that questioned prevailing Orientalist assumptions”[7] is perhaps stretching her equality of understanding to breaking point.

The apotheosis of Laisram’s work comes in the penultimate chapter on Gertrude Bell, where Laisram describes significant changes that occur at the turn of the twentieth century. A romantically dangerous Orient starts giving way to tourism and a fast developing east that challenged the preconceptions of the Western traveller, leading to “both defensive self-assertion and/or to an understanding of the country he was travelling in.”[8] Exactly what that “understanding” was, is left open for debate. In the case of Gertrude Bell, Laisram suggests that she is unlike Said’s normal Orientalist in that she modifies her “abstract maxims” when challenged by a “native”.[9] This is evidenced by her Oriental travel partner, Mikhail, who undermines her suggestion that the Oriental (or Syrian in this case) succumbs to wealth, or in Hegelian terms is dispossessed of ‘moral principle’, more easily than the Occidental, by refusing to eat the stolen food of Reshid Agha.

When Laisram asks “why Bell vacillated so much between her cultural stereotypes and her Non-Orientalist approach to the Orient” the answer is perhaps in the fact that she does not see the ‘Oriental’ as a distinct animalistic entity abstract of ‘universal humanity’. She sees ‘the Oriental’ in the Hegelian sense, as a stage in humanity, and without the institutions of which the British specialise in. This is perhaps brought forward indirectly by Bell, through the medium of Mikhail; Laisram explains that Mikhail “crushes” Bell with this astute political observation:

The heart is the same, but in your country the government is just and strong and every one of the English must obey it, even the rich; whereas with us there is no justice, but the big man eats the little, the little man eats the less and the government eats all alike.[11]

How much of this is Mikhail’s voice and how much Bell’s? It was one of Edward Said’s observations of Bell’s contribution to the production of ‘the Orient’ that she described how “In the East it all hangs together” and so “primitiveness therefore inhered in the Orient, an idea to which anyone dealing with or writing about the Orient had to return.”[12] Laisram picks out a great example of this trend in Bell’s writing without commenting on its particular relevance:

East(ern) habits of intercourse (are) less fettered by artificial chains, and a wider tolerance born of a greater diversity…society divided by an infinite number of groups, each one following a law of its own, and however fantastic to our thinking that law may be, to the Oriental it is an ample and satisfactory explanation of all peculiarities… ‘Adat-hu’ it is his custom.

Instead of focusing on Bell’s faith in the supreme logic of “Western” State institutions, Laisram looks at why Bell prefers “wandering the desert” suggesting that it is born “of a desire to escape Western Civilization.”[13] Was it not more about entering into the untrammelled fantasies of Western dreams, about Western deeds, such as the valour of combat?

“earth cried to heaven War! Red War!…”Lady! he said “the English and the Druze are one.” “I said: Thank God! We too are a fighting race.”[14]

And she was previously so excited in 1897 as her Uncle Frank was “in a great jig about Crete. He thinks there is going to be red war and an intervention of the powers and all sorts of fine things.”[15] “Gertrude Bell: The Romantic”, as the chapter is titled, seems apt, but for different reasons. Not for some contradictory, overarching antipathy towards Western stereotypes, but for service to her particular milieu of conveying old stereotypes and creating new ones.

Viewing the Islamic Orient is a succinct presentation of a myriad of useful and interesting sources and stories, combined with a worthwhile attempt at providing a more nuanced, balanced view of the individual caught in a wider struggle for understanding. Laisram does finish by hinting at a future study of “lesser known nineteenth century writers like Moberly Bell, William Von Herbert, and Harford Jones” that presented “a less known, less popular, counter-current that mocked and challenged”[16] the dominant vision of the Orient; hopefully in a way that the writers in Viewing the Orient most certainly did not.

Disclaimer: This review does not intend to provide a plenary summing up of Viewing the Islamic Orient, especially since whole chapters have gone un-mentioned. Instead it is meant to share what ideas and analysis elements of its content has inspired in me, the reviewer, relevant to my own work and interests. However, I would suggest that it is a very useful text for anyone interested in ‘Orientalism’, particularly undergraduate students, studying either English Literature or History. I’ll save the marks out of 10 for you the audience (aka the experts).

Linda, hope you don’t mind I’ve started out using some of your work as a tester. Trying to get the size right so we can embed this on the right hand side too.

Basically what it allows for is easy access to photos, or videos or any work and an ability for instant response and interaction. As you might see you can add video, audio or text responses.

Might be good.

 

Just a brief update to explain that we will now be having our Summer Symposium at Corsham Court instead of Newton Park. Details about Corsham can be found here.

Further details about the symposium can be found on our events page here. The page will be updated with our finalised agenda for speakers/subjects, and arrangements regarding catering, after-event (in Corsham) and music/dance performance. Any suggestions or advice is welcomed, so feel free to leave a comment below or post on our forums.

If you do intend on coming please RSVP, so to speak, in the comments section either here or on the Symposium page, or get in touch by email - Thanks in advance!

Corsham Court Centre: Corsham: Wiltshire: SN13 OBZ

April 2nd, Thursday, 11am-1pm

Details about Corsham Court here: Bath Spa Home

Directions here: Google Maps

Discuss here: Forum

For more information about the event follow the link below, but it is worth repeating that all and any subjects are acceptable, so please do not hesitate to send something in.

Ellie has been the principal organiser and has been dealing with most applications, but there are several contacts who you can submit the information to here: http://bsuresnet.edublogs.org/about/contact-us/

Symposium 2009 Page: http://bsuresnet.edublogs.org/events/resnet-annual-symposium-2009/

Forum: http://bsuresnet.forumotion.net/main-board-f1/brown-bags-t2.htm

Next Wednesday (25th March), usual time 12-1pm, different place. This time we’re in the big room on the left hand side of Sophia, as suggested by Jenny, which is at the top of the Newton Park Campus above Stable (and ironically near some actual stables).

For you Undergrads this will be a chance to ask any question you like to people that have already been through the postgraduate experience (at various levels, courses and institutions) or are experiencing the joys and diffculties of it now. For current Postgrads it will be a chance to discuss either the problems you face or, hopefully, the reasons why it’s been a valuable experience for you.

The general point of the series is to promote inter-disciplinary discussion, between students and teachers at all levels, in a relaxed environment, where you can bring your own lunch - coffee, tea and biscuits will be provided.

We expect to have student representatives from at least 3 schools and hopefully some tutors from others (to be confirmed closer to the date, so keep checking back).

To find out more info on this and any other Resnet event check out our events page or check out the forums (links below). Please be assured that everything you have to say we will listen to and for any follow up information you can check back here, leave a comment, or get in touch with us on the forums.

Event: http://bsuresnet.edublogs.org/events/march-25th-brown-bag/

Forum: http://bsuresnet.forumotion.net/main-board-f1/brown-bags-t2.htm