German Orientalism

Abstract

Review of: Suzanne L. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race and Scholarship, Cambridge and Washington, D.C.: Cambridge University Press, 2009. This analysis of Suzanne L. Marchand’s German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race and Scholarship reads her contribution in part against the background of Edward Said’s path breaking book Orientalism. Differences lie in her more expansive understanding of the term ‘Oriental’ to include the Far East and her concentration on German scholarship. Approaches to Orientalist scholarship are often judgmental. Marchand complicates the discourse by speaking to the individual and institutional circumstances, and not overestimating the effect that scholars have when they talk truth, or even merely ideas, to power. Her treatment of scholarship of visual art and of Jewish learning are the areas that could benefit from more nuanced thought and more research.