Marquette University e-Publications@Marquette English Faculty Research and Publications English Department 1-1-2006 The eF male Captivity Narrative: Blood, Water, and Orientalism Diane Hoeveler Marquette University,
[email protected] Published version. "The eF male Captivity Narrative: Blood, Water, and Orientalism," Interrogating Orientalism: Contextual Approaches and Pedagogical Practices. Eds. Diane Hoeveler and Jeffrey Cass. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2006: 46-71. Permalink. © 2006 Ohio State University Press. Used with permission. ~ I CHAPTER 2 The Female Captivity Narrative Blood, Water, and Orientalism DIANE LONG HOEVELER It is in the Orient that we must search for the highest Romanticism. -Friedrich Schlegel 1. History The story of how Europeans institutionalized, commodified, and controlled their anxious projections about Muslim "Others" is a long, complex, and ultimately tragic saga that the term "Orientalism" only partially conveys. Historians as well as literary, religious, political, and cultural critics have attempted for close to four hundred years to come to terms with the mean ing of Islam and more broadly with the challenges that the Eastern world presents to the West. More importantly for the purposes of this essay, it is necessary to recognize that the binary model (Self/Other) adopted by Edward Said to define Orientalism has been challenged and modified by recent feminist literary critics as both gender and class-blind. Famously, Said has defined his understanding of the cultural practice of Orientalism as a "Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient" (3), while he has asserted that Orientalism is a discourse system that cannot be understood apart from recognizing it as "the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage-and even produce-the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period" (3).