On Baroque Orientalism
We still lack a model for understanding Orientalism before Empire and before the Enlightenment. If Orientalism is a specifically colonial discourse, what to make of the Orientalist texts and images produced in Renaissance and Baroque Europe, before Europeans had asserted colonial power in Asia, and when the most powerful Empire in the Mediterranean was that of the Ottomans? And if Orientalism is a discourse tied up with Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment theories of anthropology and history, then what to make of the Orientalism produced by Europeans living before, say, Montesquieu? What was the place given to the various cultures of Asia in the increasingly cosmopolitan libraries of baroque Europe? And how was European knowledge of Asia produced in this period? This paper attempts to address some of these questions by considering scholarly engagements with the Orient in seventeenth-century France.