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The Jew and the Odalisque: Two Tropes Lost on the Way from Classic Orientalism to Islamophobia
Abstract
Contemporary Islamophobic discourses lack two of the important figures of classic orientalism: (1) the “Jew” as an “oriental” ethnoreligious figure akin to “Muslim,” and (2) of the “harem” as an eroticized trope of male domination. Their near-disappearance signals that Islamophobia is no longer entirely generated by the same impulses as the classic orientalism of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Islamophobia is defined by hostility to Muslims, but classic orientalism also included other forms of affect. Islamophobia imagines Islam and Muslims as the irredeemably Other, with no links to the Christian traditions of the West, while classic Orientalism typically saw Islam as a Semitic religion akin to Judaism, and therefore as representing an inferior but nevertheless related form of civilization to Christianity. The “Semitic race,” too, was held to be white, while Islamophobia today has contributed to the racialization of the prototypical Muslim as “brown.” The imagined relationship between Christianity and Islam in twenty-first-century Islamophobia recognizes no historical and theological contiguity, and has replaced supersession with the clash of civilizations as the form of imagining the relationship between the West and Islam and Muslims. The clash of civilization concept has no use for the harem inmate, a figure that, as the target of overt desire, had not been entirely removed into absolute alterity. This image of the lascivious Orient was connected to that of the Semitic Jew, the “Jewess” being the trope in classical orientalism that united the gendered biblical imagination with the orientalist. To be sure, in spite of the large affective gamut of classic orientalism it was still at its core a discourse of colonial power and white supremacy. It is just that, with the disappearance of the two complex tropes of the Semitic Jew and the harem inmate in contemporary Islamophobia, the unadorned nucleus of orientalism has been starkly revealed, and everything else has been shed.
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