New MEI Viewpoints: Orientalism

There's another of MEI's Viewpoints series available: Orientalism's Wake: The Ongoing Politics of a Polemic. The descriptive page is here and the entire publication in .pdf is here. Edited by Daniel Varisco of Hofstra, it has contributions by eight scholars. As you may have guessed, it's about the ongoing debate over Edward Said's Orientalism, published in 1978.

The eight contributors include a number of prominent figures, and include Robert Irwin, whose Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and its Discontents has been getting some attention recently. I haven't yet read it, but The Moor Next Door posted his own review recently, and there was some give and take in the comments to the post.

The fact that we're all still arguing about Said's Orientalism over 30 years later suggests that whatever one's approach, it was a work that greatly affected our field.