Mavi Boncuk | Mary Roberts[1]. Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008. ISBN: 978-0822339670
Review by Joan DelPlato | Bard College at Simon’s Rock
Mary Roberts’s book marks an important turn in the study of representations of the harem in both visual and written texts. The West has had much to say in words and pictures about the harem in the nineteenth century but, until now, few records have been located about historical Ottoman women themselves. In her short and highly accessible book Mary Roberts develops the newest direction in Orientalist studies by considering “intimate outsiders”: those British and Ottomans – artists, writers, and patrons – who had privileged, cross-cultural connections to the harem. She investigates the grey areas between East and West, challenging the strict binary articulated most notably in Edward Said’s seminal Orientalism (1978). She demonstrates that the divide between western Orientalists and Ottomans in the field of nineteenth-century visual art was bridged, more open to historical contingency, and more engaged with micropolitical exertions of power and constructions of blended identity. She locates western artists–John Frederick Lewis, Mary Walker and Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann–and about a dozen women writers who enter into cultural exchange with Ottoman hostess-patrons. And far from being stereotypically opiated odalisques lounging half-dressed in anticipation of their paşas, passive objects pitched toward a male viewer, elite Ottoman women in Istanbul and Cairo exerted their agency in helping to formulate their own self-representations as a mixture of eastern and western influences at a time when Turkey and Egypt constructed respective modernization movements.
Review by Joan DelPlato | Bard College at Simon’s Rock
Mary Roberts’s book marks an important turn in the study of representations of the harem in both visual and written texts. The West has had much to say in words and pictures about the harem in the nineteenth century but, until now, few records have been located about historical Ottoman women themselves. In her short and highly accessible book Mary Roberts develops the newest direction in Orientalist studies by considering “intimate outsiders”: those British and Ottomans – artists, writers, and patrons – who had privileged, cross-cultural connections to the harem. She investigates the grey areas between East and West, challenging the strict binary articulated most notably in Edward Said’s seminal Orientalism (1978). She demonstrates that the divide between western Orientalists and Ottomans in the field of nineteenth-century visual art was bridged, more open to historical contingency, and more engaged with micropolitical exertions of power and constructions of blended identity. She locates western artists–John Frederick Lewis, Mary Walker and Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann–and about a dozen women writers who enter into cultural exchange with Ottoman hostess-patrons. And far from being stereotypically opiated odalisques lounging half-dressed in anticipation of their paşas, passive objects pitched toward a male viewer, elite Ottoman women in Istanbul and Cairo exerted their agency in helping to formulate their own self-representations as a mixture of eastern and western influences at a time when Turkey and Egypt constructed respective modernization movements.
[1] Dr Mary Roberts’ research interests include: European, especially British, art of the Nineteenth Century; gender, Orientalism, the history and culture of travel and development of Ottoman art in the Nineteenth Century and cultural exchange with European artists.| The department of Art History and Film Studies | University of Sydney, Australia
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