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Books > History > Asian / Middle Eastern history
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The Sultan's Court - European Fantasies of the East (Paperback)
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The Sultan's Court - European Fantasies of the East (Paperback)
Series: Wo Es War
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Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) has justly attracted great respect
and attention for its account of Western perceptions and
representations of the Orient, but the English-speaking world has
for too long been unaware of another classic in the same field
which appeared in France only a year later. Alain Grosrichard's The
Sultan's Court is a fascinating and careful deconstruction of
Western accounts of "Oriental despotism" in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, focusing particularly on portrayals of the
Ottoman Empire and the supposedly enigmatic and opaque structure of
the despot's power and his court of viziers, janissaries, mutes,
dwarfs, eunuchs and countless wives. Drawing on the writings of
travelers and philosophers such as Montesquieu, Rousseau and
Voltaire, Grosrichard goes further than merely cataloguing their
intense fascination with the vortex of capriciousness, violence,
cruelty, lust, sexual perversion and slavery which they perceived
in the seraglio. Deftly and subtly using a Lacanian psychoanalytic
framework, he describes the process as one in which these leading
Enlightenment figures were constructing a fantasmatic Other to
counterpose to their project of a rationally based society. The
Sultan's Court seeks not to refute the misconceptions but rather to
expose the nature of the fantasy and what it can reveal about
modern political thought and power relations more generally.
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