Reflections on Traveling Through Time with Orientalist Authors

Orientalism is the imitation of aspects in the Eastern world, it is a way of seeing that imagines, emphasizes, and distorts differences of Arab peoples and their cultures as compared to that of Europe and the U.S. These depictions are usually done by writers, designers, and artists from the West.

Our project aims to apply tools like Palladio and other methods on our orientalist spreadsheet and perform trend analysis by noticing any relations on the spreadsheet, helping us in understanding Orientalists. We chose this topic because we are students living in Lebanon, an oriental country, our aim is to study and point out the different relations of Orientalism and mainly the different relations between orientalist authors. We would like to study how the Western world perceives us and understand how different authors that come from different backgrounds, describe our Eastern world. For this reason, as we already said in our last blog, we based ourselves on four main research questions: 

1. Which gender were mainly orientalist authors?
2. Which country do the majority of orientalist authors come from?
3. Throughout which years were the majority of orientalist books published?
4. What is the relation between the text categories and the publication dates?

The main goal of our project was to try studying and pointing out the different relations of orientalism and mainly the different relations between orientalist authors. A huge interest of ours was to study how the Western world perceives us and understand how different authors, coming from different backgrounds, describe our Eastern world. 

Throughout our progress in the project we have not completely changed the direction of our project. However, we definitely enhanced and tweaked parts of the project after receiving very crucial and necessary feedback from our course instructor Dr. Najla Jarkas.

We faced many obstacles and difficulties while working on the project, but we definitely took the necessary steps to overcome the issues we faced. The first issue we faced was when we began working on our Orientalist spreadsheet, we noticed a few inconsistencies and discrepancies with the date that was on the spreadsheet. In order to eliminate these discrepancies and inconsistencies we decided to standardize each metric and by doing so that will make the data on the spreadsheet richer and will keep things smooth and consistent. By doing so we hope that future students of ENGL 256D will benefit from our efforts and use the spreadsheet with ease. Another obstacle we faced that was not expected was because of the given current global pandemic it made working on our project collectively a challenge. As before the pandemic we used to meet up in person and work together and we realized that meeting in person definitely helped us be more efficient and effective with our work.

Enough talking about us, and let’s talk about the project. After placing our data, found on our/ spreadsheet, on Palladio, we were able to come up with general realizations and we were able to take these results to another level.

In fact, we have studied the gender or the authors that we researched, and we found that more than 80% of the orientalists were male.  This finding didn’t mean that there weren’t more female authors in the world, but our data was rather male-centered.

Moreover, we have discovered that the books or writings published, of the data we have, were mainly published during the end of the 19th century, towards the beginning of the 20^th century. In fact, these publications were mostly made after the year 1885.

In reality, this is where things became more interesting from our end. We have compared these dates of publications with the feelings or emotions with the publication dates.

 What is surprising is that we actually found a relation between these 2 and we didn’t actually expect that at first. We can clearly see that, during the 18^th century, even though we didn’t have much data compared to other centuries, publications were mainly centered around travel and fiction. In fact, after extensive research, and after digging deeper in these publications, we can see that this was due to the constant travel of the writers to Turkey (what was mainly known as Constantinople in the Roman Empire), Egypt, Morocco and Syria.

On the other hand, the writings of the 19^th century were more focused on fiction and on history. In fact, this was done to describe folklore, and philosophies to create a literary environment of colonial exploration from a distinctly European worldview.

As for the 21^st century, we only had 2 writings from 2007 and 2015, which aren’t very representative, but they mainly focused on history.

Since we have detailed the relations we have within our data, we were able to have a better look and understand what was missing within our data. For the next batch of students, we would then recommend to include more female authors in order to have more comprehensive data. Moreover, we believe that we should include more writers coming from other countries than the UK and USA and have a more even spread of the authors in the countries. In addition to that, as we mentioned earlier, we think that it would be better if we include more recent works. This way we would be able to study the evolution of Orientalism throughout the centuries.