RADIO NETHERLANDS WORLDWIDE: Dutch writers and artists in the 19th century took great interest in the Middle East. Art historian Jan de Hond wrote his dissertation about these orientalists. Some were out to prove the superiority of their own Western culture, while others were searching for something missing at home, such as free love.
In the 19th century, thousands of European writers and artists travelled to the Islamic countries around the Mediterranean. Their books and paintings found immense popularity among a large section of the public. French and British writers and artists were perhaps more obsessed with oriental culture than others but Orientalism was also a phenomenon in the Netherlands and it interested writers such as Marcellus Emants and Louis Couperus and the artist Marius Bauer.
What lay at the bottom of the enormous interest in the Orient? According to the Palestinian literary theorist Edward Said, the image that European writers and artists constructed of the Orient was dependent on colonialism. In order to justify colonialism, the Orient was presented as the opposite of the occident and the opposite of how Europeans saw themselves. Europe was dynamic, enlightened, rational and democratic and the Orient was seen as static, backward, irrational and despotic. In the 1970s, Mr Said's book, Orientalism became the bible of left-wing Arab intellectuals. One-dimensional >>> By Michel Hoebink | 29-02-2008
Mark Alexander (Paperback)
Mark Alexander (Hardback)
