Orientalism: History, Theory, and the Arts by John M. MacKenzieReview by: Dane KennedyThe International History Review, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Nov., 1996), pp. 912-914Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40107585 .

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012 The International History Review

working-class formation in the German-owned textile mills of Passaic, New Jersey from 1889 to 1926. This came about after the First World War, according to

Beckert, when the German skilled workers were compelled to join the union of the less skilled non-German workers. In the concluding essays, K. Bade, editor of the

widely acclaimed standard work on German migrations, Deutsche im Ausland, Fremde in Deutschland (Munich, 1992), re-examines the German migration ex-

perience to the present, and D. Hoerder reviews the state of German scholarship. The contributions are conscientiously and competently edited, prefaced with a

very useful interpretative essay by Hoerder, and furnished with a ten-page index.

They will no doubt inspire further research and fuel the ongoing scholarly debate.

Memorial University of Newfoundland Gerhard P. Bassler

John M. MacKenzie. Orientalism: History, Theory, and the Arts. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995; dist. New York: St Martin's Press. Pp. xxii, 232. $19.95 (us), paper.

A willingness to enter the debate provoked by Edward Said in his hugely influ- ential Orientalism (1978) has been long overdue from historians of imperialism. For this reason alone, John MacKenzie's new book is welcome. It is both a po- lemic against Said and the scholarship he has inspired and a paean to Orientalist influences on the arts in Britain and the West more generally. MacKenzie rejects the Saidian interpretation of Orientalism as the discursive drive by an expansionist West to essentialize Eastern peoples and cultures as a monolithic Other. Instead, he presents Orientalism as a complex, but broadly appreciative cultural response by the West to the encounter with the East, offering detailed empirical evidence of Orientalism's creative contribution to Western painting, music, and other forms of artistic expression.

MacKenzie devotes his first chapter to a critique of Said. He charges that Said's work is essentially ahistorical, lacking familiarity with the historiography of im-

perialism; that it imposes simplistic binary categories on a highly variegated record of cross-cultural interactions between the West and the societies it encountered; that it lacks logical coherence due to its reliance on incompatible theoretical

positions; and that it ignores popular culture, taking an elitist view of art. The

critique continues in the second chapter, where MacKenzie examines the limita- tions of the scholarship inspired by Said, commonly known as colonial discourse

analysis. While MacKenzie finds merit in the efforts of Mary Louise Pratt, Billie

Melman, and certain others to historicize and problematize the relationship between imperial and indigenous cultures, 'too much of this work seems to circle around an intellectual superstructure wrenched from its empirical base' (p. 38). He concludes that colonial discourse analysis replicates many of the shortcomings of Said.

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Reviews of Books 013

The rest of the book is devoted to tracing the impact of Orientalism on Western

art, with chapters on painting, architecture, design, music, and theatre. MacKenzie moves knowledgeably from one artistic genre to another, marshalling a formidable

array of evidence of Orientalist influences on both the high and the popular arts. He shows that European artists made use of different areas and aspects of the Orient (Islamic design, Japanese prints, and so on) at different times, in different

countries, and in different forms. The Orientalist influence was more apparent, for

example, in craft design than in architecture, among French painters than among British ones, and on the^m de siecle than on other eras. Set in a broader context, Orientalism could be seen as simply one in a sequence of Others that included internal British and European rivals; it was also 'one element within a wider search for folk and exotic sources of inspiration' (p. 171). At the centre of MacKenzie's

analysis is the insistence that Eastern cultures were a positive source of inspiration to Western artists, who often drew on exotic traditions to critique their own

society and to break away from its conventions, including those surrounding im-

perialism itself. As a corrective to the simplifications and distortions of colonial discourse

analysis, MacKenzie's book has great merit, but it does not damage the Saidian framework as seriously as it intends. MacKenzie's argument that Orientalism

helped to inspire a radical political and aesthetic stance among some of its pro- ponents is less subversive to Said's claims than it may seem, since European radicalism seldom translated into a critique of imperial assumptions and colonial

practices. His insistence that the West had its own internal Others merely points to the pervasiveness of these discursive designs and his claims that the com-

position of this Oriental Other changed over time simply accentuates the need to historicize this process rather than reject it.

MacKenzie's affection for an artistic heritage that he feels has been unfairly accused of complicity in imperialism is both the book's main strength and its

principal weakness. MacKenzie draws on his sense of personal affront and his intimate knowledge of various arts (especially music) to organize a spirited defence of Orientalism as a source of cultural enrichment. But this largely begs the

question posed by Said (who, incidentally, is also a great aficionado of Western

music). To say that the arts in the West drew inspiration from Eastern cultures does nothing to negate the claim that the West tended to categorize these varied cultures under the general rubric of the Orient and that this categorization invariably served to establish an oppositional relationship to the West that fur- thered the interests of those who imposed these discursive categories. MacKenzie

attempts to divorce the arts from broader ideological forces by ignoring literature and other textual forms of artistic expression, which are far more likely to reveal

representational intentions than, for example, music. Even when he discusses

operas and other theatrical productions that incorporate librettos, scripts, and similar texts, he stubbornly refuses to examine these sources, insisting that 'the

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914 The International History Review

Orientalist productions of the nineteenth century were significant more for their

designs and effects than for their plots' (p. 197)! In effect, MacKenzie refuses to face Said on his own textual turf. Nevertheless, he repeatedly encounters evidence that Orientalism was being used by painters, architects, and the like to evoke

stereotypes of the Other. By the end, his relentless efforts to disassociate the arts from a Saidian notion of Orientalism seem to drive him to the improbable position of denying European aesthetic expression any imperialist ideological associations at all. This is, needless to say, a surprising and disappointing terminus for an

imperial historian of MacKenzie's stature and sophistication to arrive at, and it leaves Said still to be reckoned with.

University of Nebraska Dane Kennedy

Theophilus C. Prousis. Russian Society and the Greek Revolution. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press. 1994. Pp. xi, 259. $30.00 (us).

Coming in the heyday of restoration politics in continental Europe, the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence in 1821 inspired hope to defeated liberalism and captured the literary and artistic imagination in many ways. In Russia, the

response to the Greek struggle for redemption from the Ottoman yoke was even

stronger than in the West, because of the common Orthodox identity and

Byzantine cultural heritage that Greeks and Russians shared. The monograph under review is a study of the diverse ties and social sentiments at work in the cultural community of the 'orthodox commonwealth' of eastern Europe in the critical decade of the 1820 s. Russian autocracy under Alexander I and, after 1825, under Nicholas I upheld the empire's commitment to the Metternichean order and to the Holy Alliance and thus stayed aloof from the liberation struggle waged by the Orthodox subjects of the Ottoman Sultan. The tsar's attitude forced the

resignation in 1822 of his Greek-born foreign minister, John Capodistria. But the broader Russian society reacted differently. The Greek rising found many enthusiastic supporters among the Decembrists. The war party in the imperial court may have lost its cause, but a gigantic relief effort was mounted by the clergy of Russian Orthodoxy, leading Russian philanthropists, and Greek benefactors

living in Russia to alleviate the suffering caused among the Greek population by Turkish reprisals for the rising.

The attitudes of Russian philhellenism were to a considerable extent shaped by the discovery of Greece's splendid classical heritage by Russian scholarship in the

opening decades of the nineteenth century. In Russia's 'classical awakening', a

leading role was played by a towering figure in the Greek intellectual revival, Eugenios Voulgaris, who had risen to prominence in Russia under Catherine the Great. Following upon Voulgaris's footsteps, a remarkable succession of Russian

Hellenists, among them Aleksei Olenin, Sergei Uvarov, Ivan Martynov, and

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