Disorienting Vision: Rereading Stereotypes in French Orientalist Texts and Images

This book begins with a painting. Loyalty to cultural artefacts, listening carefully to what they have to say, is the secret of Inge E. Boer’s approach to the French Orientalists tradition. In a post-Said manner, Boer provides close readings of philosophical and literary texts, paintings, prints and other artefacts. Her readings establish a dialogue with critical post-colonial and feminist theory as well as (art-) historical and literary scholarship. She treats all these artefacts like subjects in their own right, enabling them to show and tell. This dialogic attention to detail makes for an innovative vision that shuns the sweeping statements of a priori conviction, as much as avoiding the unwitting endorsements that the rhetoric of scholarship sometimes promotes.