Staging the Orient

Description

LebanonPostcard presents a beautiful book Staging the Orient: Fin de Siècle Popular Visions – Représentations de l’Orient: Imagerie Populaire Fin de Siècle – Wolf-Dieter Lemke (PhD in Islamic studies from the university of Cologne), Dar An Nahar 2004 – English and French. Hard cover book 32x28x2.5 cm, 240 pages.

Staging the Orient introduces into the well-established Orientalist discourse a new barely explored dimension: the dissemination of Orientalist imagery through the channels of popular culture. It presents a dazzling range of mostly unpublished visual material, featuring picture postcards, lantern slides, photographs, trade cards, scraps, book illustrations, and cover art.

Staging the Orient reveals how this material crossed over into exhibitions, world fairs, and circus shows, and then emerged on stage, in theater, and on the silver screen. It illustrates how the enchantment with Orientalist images produced fleeting fashions along with more lasting phenomena.

Staging the Orient explores several aspects of fin de siècle culture:
– The immense popular interest in the non-European world.
– The phenomenal increase in picture production made possible by new printing techniques.
– The open-mindedness of an era of stylistic experimentations.

Staging the Orient shows how a complex web of interwoven and reciprocal images materialized, how stereotypes were formed, and why they continue to linger today. It attempts to explain the deep impact, on the Western mind, of this tightly knit, widely accepted texture of pictorial representations.

Content:

Basics
Contexts
The Orient imagined and portrayed
The Orient installed
Going for a stroll, taking a look – The Orient of the chief cities
Where to find entertainment blended with information
How to win visual information
Where to look for guidance on Islamic art
How to find Orient-inspired architecture
Where to drink and eat in style
How to make oneself at home in the Orient
Changing appearances, adopting lifestyles
How to set up home in the literary space
How to discover the Orient on stage and on the silver screen
Where to find pleasure amid Oriental settings
Bringing the Orient of the West to the East
Looking back and summing up

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