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Reina Lewis. Rethinking Orientalism:Women, Travel and the Ottoman

Harem.

by Gillian Whitlock

Reina Lewis. Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem. New Brunswick:Rutgers UP, 2004. 297 pp. ISBN 0-8135-3543-3, $29.95.

In this book Reina Lewis focuses on a group of women writers whose travel accounts,memoirs, and fictions offer a non-Western engagement with the stereotypes of the Orientalwoman. As Lewis reminds us at the outset, stereotypes change; they are challenged and yet

they also possess a flexibility that continues to structure the terms of contemporary power andoppression. "Orientalism" gathers together a series of powerful stereotypes that arefundamental to the self-construction of the Western subject as an enlightened, modern,sovereign individual understood over and against its "Other," understood as the archaic,primitive, exotic Oriental. Lewis's concern, both here and in her earlier study of women's rolesin imperial culture and discourse, Gendering Orientalism: Race Femininity and Representation(1996), is to grasp how the West is constructed through its Others. This preoccupation definesthe field of postcolonial criticism, emerging originally in Edward Said's groundbreaking studyOrientalism (1978). And yet, as Said himself recognized in later work, it is a terrain that needsto be mapped with careful attention to specific determinations of gender, race, class, andethnicity, and in locations where local relations and the coordinates of place and time aremarked precisely and with care. It is this attention to the specific formulations of Orientalistdiscourse, and the ways that these are resisted and used variously, that defines Reina Lewis'sscholarly project of rethinking Orientalism and building on current developments in Middle

Eastern women's studies.

The series of little-known autobiographical English-language publications about segregated lifeby Ottoman women Halide Edib, Demetra Vaka Brown, the sisters Zeyneb Hanim and MelekHanim, and the British author Grace Ellison that Lewis focuses on here emerged early in thetwentieth century. These texts are read together as a gendered counter-discourse, apoliticized rewriting of Western harem literature that occurred at a time of tumultuous socialand political change as the Ottoman Empire was transformed into the modern nation state ofTurkey. In part, Lewis's intention is to produce a biographical study of these women thatbrings them alive in a "quaintly old-fashioned way" (11), and Rethinking Orientalism includesa series of photographs that do encourage this kind of engagement. However, theseautobiographies and images are taken up in what is often dense and sophisticated discourseanalysis. My own heavily marked-up copy of this book, scored with highlighter and pencil,records what has been a slow process of often labored reading that might well defeat some

readers who would otherwise find these little-known women and this moment in MiddleEastern history fascinating in exactly the old-fashioned way Lewis desires. This is a pity, and areflection of the fact that the mix of theoretical and biographical work required to "rethinkOrientalism" in more subtle and complex ways can easily kill its subjects of attention.

Nevertheless, this is an important book that repays the effort of reading and has much to offerpostcolonial and feminist scholarly work. Lewis focuses on some of the most resistant,entrenched tropes of Western Orientalist fantasy: the harem, the veil, and polygamy. Theseemerge again around and about us now, hideously emboldened by the "war on terror." Bytaking these up in a study that is meticulously attentive to the particular codifications of

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gender and ethnicity, Lewis means to take up the flexibility of stereotypes, and their variousand contradictory social and political uses. For example, she reminds us that from Lady MaryWortley Montagu's Embassy Letters (published posthumously in 1763) onwards, womenwriters have taken a culturally relativist stance to the harem, presenting Ottoman women aspossessing freedoms not available to Western women, and using the harem as a way ofreflecting upon Western domesticity rather than a voyeuristic sexual sphere emblematic ofOriental excess. By the mid-nineteenth century, trips to the harems of the Middle East were a

staple of the tourist industry for Western women, to the point that Ottoman women began toresist their commodification as tourist spectacle. Lewis reads the autobiographical writings inEnglish by Ottoman and Muslim women that began to appear in Europe early in the twentiethcentury as an engagement in print with the West and an attempt to intervene in Ottomangender relations at a time of rapid social change due to colonial modernity.

For Lewis, rethinking the rigid orthodoxies of Orientalism requires careful attention totransculturation: the ongoing and provisional invention of selfhood and identity acrossdifferences of gender, ethnicity, and class. It also entails attention to the vicissitudes of theWestern literary markets that reproduce the commodification of Orientalized subjects. Aboveall though, the representation of Ottoman women as active agents in their own representationwho were able to make strategic use of Orientalist discourses in their interactions with theWest is critical for Lewis's project. It is here that we can see the work of biographical andautobiographical writing and criticism in shaping a more complex view of Muslim women aspowerful agents in their own right, taking the opportunities offered by progressive modernityto conceptualize a specifically Eastern and Muslim vision of emancipation. Although female

emancipation is often told as a Western story, the writings of these women suggest otherwise;Ottoman women, suggests Lewis, pursued an emancipation that must be specifically Oriental,a selective amalgamation of Eastern and Western ideas (140).

This, then, is an important book for thinking about the present. Lewis opens up the mostentrenched space of the Orientalist imagination, the harem, to ambiguity and to the agency ofMuslim women. Its subtitle will ensure that Rethinking Orientalism will travel on the well-wornpaths established by the ongoing obsession with the harem. Yet it does so provocatively, usinglife narratives to render this "stereotypically deadened" space as a "social text": open tointerpretation.

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Publication Information: Article Title: Reina Lewis. Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel and the OttomanHarem. Contributors: Gillian Whitlock - author. Journal Title: Biography. Volume: 29. Issue: 2. Publication Year:2006. Page Number: 383+. COPYRIGHT 2006 University of Hawaii Press; COPYRIGHT 2006 Gale Group