Description
Book SynopsisBuilding on the critical foundations established by Edward Said in Orientalism, Foreign Bodies examines the relationship between the Orientalist tradition in French art and literature and France''s colonial history. It focuses on a central dimension of this exchange: the prevalent figure of the oriental woman, and the interplay of race and gender in both domestic and colonial history. It also offers a genealogy of contemporary French attitudes to Islamic culture, in which beliefs about sexuality and gender relations continue to occupy a privileged place.
The author examines the extent to which the rhetorical status and political implications of Orientalism register the changing circumstances of French colonial activity, tracing the convergence, or divergence, of colonial practice and the literary record. She also argues against the tendency, in both historical and theoretical writing on colonialism, to divide center from margins, metropolitan from colonial. Inste
Trade Review
"This well-researched book is one of the most stimulating studies of French Orientalism and colonial discourse in decades. . . . At a time of historic East-West tensions, this book advances understanding of cultural politics and the politics of Orientalism, in particular. Recommended for upper-division undergraduates through faculty."—Choice
"Whether in the case of Montesquieu's De l'Esprit des lois or his Lettres persanes, whether in the instance of the Oriental tale by Diderot or Gautier's Le Roman de la momie, Dobie demonstrates with aplomb the interplay between context and text. Her approach is wide-ranging and creative, drawing adeptly from psychoanalysis in her detection of 'foot fetishism' in the writing of Gautier, and in her description of the phenomenon of 'displacement' in the works of Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, and others."—H-Net Reviews
"Foreign Bodies provides perceptive readings of the selected texts. Dobie deftly uses a deconstructive approach to point [out] the ambivalence that lurks within the representations of the Oriental woman that she chooses to analyze."—Julia Simon, Comparative Literature Studies
"Foreign Bodies is a provocative book, revealing both intriguing connections and disconnections."—H-France Book Reviews
