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[Expositions 7.2 (2013) 62–75]  Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747–5376 
 

Re-‘art’-iculating Orientalism: Musings on Said and Gérôme1 

MAGHAN KEITA 
Villanova University  

Figure 1: Jean‐Léon Gérôme, The Snake Charmer (1880) 

The black man is lord of the people of the East. 
 –Al-Baladhuri2 

 
Yet the desert is full of Zanj married to Arab wives, and they have been princes and kings and 
have safeguarded your rights and sheltered you against your enemies. 
 –Al-Jahiz3 

 
What does critical discourse do? [...] direct critics’ attention to [...] function. [...] Much as 
it may seem to be an impoverishing view [...] this particular kind of functionalism has 
had, on the whole, a salutary effect. It has done away with empty rhetorical testimonials 
proclaiming a work’s greatness or humanistic worth. [...] it has made it possible for critics 
to talk seriously.4 

 
 



63  Keita 
 

  

It is an irony of sorts, to begin an essay on Edward Said with a reference cited by Bernard Lewis, 
but the world of the “Orient” and “Orientalists” and their critics is replete with irony, 
contradiction, and oxymorons. This is further compounded by an evocation of Gérôme, and in 
particular the Gérôme piece that is used to draw attention to, and then to focus Said’s argument. 
Gérôme’s provocative and seductive image of Muslim decadence and dissolution becomes the 
gateway to understanding a critique of Orientalism – the rationalization of empire based on the 
degeneration of once powerful peoples.  

I want to draw attention to this thesis – not to refute it, but to refine it. I want to point to its 
nuances and allow them to speak to and of the peoples inherent to the construction of the Orient 
by scholars that Said claimed to admire, and those who are his and their putative acolytes. 
Peoples who, Marx would have argued, are “without history.” I should admit here, that like 
many, I had misread Said. This appears to be a feature for both those who love and who loathe 
him. My angst was somewhere in between, occasioned by the “company” Said kept. As an 
Africanist, I was driven by the perceived slight of Africa and Africans in his construction of the 
“Orient.” In that, I am still not assured that his vision was broad enough for such inclusion. Yet, 
it is clear that those he admired, and many who wrote after him, neither offered nor fathomed 
African participation in this “Orient.” 

To that point, Said’s embrace of the works of Fernand Braudel and Janet Abu-Lughod, and 
their fundamental absenting of Africa from the discourses that their particular analyses spurred, 
is a serious slight in a community dedicated to notions of progressive historicism. This is further 
complicated by those who follow, and seemingly lionize, the Annalystes without critiques of 
their adherence to Enlightment theses of difference; the seeming inability of some to detach 
themselves from the privileges and legacy of empire, and their distortions; and the problems 
inherent in not speaking to the processes of constructing histories in a world dominated by race 
and the racialization of knowledge. This is, in large part, Ann Ducille’s critique of colleagues 
who are the main proponents of the “subaltern” school, yet have managed to skirt Africa and 
Africans as well.5 

To his credit, Said recognizes the power of discourses such as those lodged in Afrocentrism to 
disrupt and then reconstruct critiques of modernity and its devices. However, even his treatment 
of this is in passing. They are not significant to his argument. As such, Said, those he praises, and 
those who follow, fail to recognize the historically “abiding presence” – to paraphrase Morrison 
– of Africa, Africans, and their diasporas. 

I want to talk seriously here. Of course, the “Orient” I conceptualize begins centuries – even 
millennia – before Said’s preoccupation with modern imperialism. It is, however, a concept of 
the “Orient” that undergirds all attempts to separate “East” from “West.” It is at least as old, in 
Western eyes, as Homer and Herodotus. But even there, Africa and Africans are part of this 
space that is about to become “Orientalized.”6 It is an Orient inclusive of Africa that runs counter 
to the elisions of Braudel, Abu-Lughod, and company. 

Closer to Said’s starting point – the medieval and Renaissance – was a conceptualization that 
saw Africa as the “closest” of all “Oriental” space – “Middle India.”7 With this among the 



Re-“art”-iculating Orientalism  64 
 

documents of Christian and Muslim chroniclers was an “Oriental” Africa made so by 
interlocking political economic relations with the Indian Ocean well before the rise of Islam, and 
with the Mediterranean Basin through Islam’s high point and beyond its demise in the West.8 

At the moment that Said begins his critique – the late eighteenth, early nineteenth centuries – 
the “Orient” seems infused with “Africa,” though many historians and cultural critics of the era 
seem to be unable to bring themselves to this realization. In his critique of the cultural and socio-
political economic representational power of Aida, Said speaks to Africa, if only obliquely. Cairo 
has a “massive centrality to Africa”; the Pasha Ismail is the “Emperor of Africa”; by implication, 
Egypt, as the trope of Orientalism, is Africanized.9 

The essential storyline of the opera – the conflict between the Egyptian and Nubian states – is 
both complicated and understood in the “racialized” love affair between an Egyptian prince and 
an Ethiopian princess. That Rhadames finds Aida beautiful lends itself to one of the paradoxes of 
Orientalism that extends all the way back to medieval European anxieties. That an Egyptian 
pasha and Verdi choose a “black” woman as the protagonist in an “Arab”/European celebration 
of nation-state and empire provides more complication in the direction which I choose to 
explore. These are in line with Jeffrey Cohen’s observations on the perils of “saracen 
Enjoyment.”10 Conceptually, this is also where Said’s reading of Orientalism becomes more 
complex if we are to refer to Sibel Bozdoğan’s essay, “Journey to the East: Ways of Looking at 
the Orient and the Question of Representation.” Bozdoğan suggests there are other ways of 
“reading” the “Orient” – even through the “cataloguing” of Orientalists themselves. Her 
evocation of Schumacher and Foucault, and through them by extension Lyotard, Barthes, and 
Morrison, speak to issues of representation, reading, and the agency of the subject in relation to 
the artist/author that question – in Schumacher’s language – the differences between “point of 
view” on one hand, and “standpoint” on the other.11 

Orientalists found the Orient both beautiful and dangerous. That artists, such as Gérôme, 
found the African type in the Orient posed another dangerous beauty that has been elided by 
modern scholars of all persuasions, and that now, as Cohen has argued, challenges 
“epistemological paradigms,” particularly those which are racially constructed. 

These epistemological paradigms are the “stereotypical opposition[s]” that Linda Nochlin 
suggests we need to avoid. For her, this involves serious engagement with the “unconscious 
political presuppositions” that rest alongside of conscious and overt assertions of the political 
aesthetic – “those consciously formulated political programs or commissions.” By implication, 
Nochlin’s assertion leads to the possibilities that even the pre-ordained “conscious inscription of 
the political in the work of art” is flanked, and sometimes countered by “unconscious” socio-
political economic dynamics that often elude and/or “escape” the artist/author; that complicate 
the responses of the audience; and, that focus on the subjects’ abilities to empower. What 
Nochlin’s brief indicates is another way of identifying and interrogating the power of the 
subaltern in the very works intended to define, categorize, and delimit that power, and of course, 
the individuals who wield it. She also points, again, to the limitations of many progressive 
historians in their failure to recognize and to analyze these subjects. 



65  Keita 
 

  

Mark Ledbury’s review of Todd Porterfield’s The Allure of Empire: Art in the Service of 
French Imperialism 1798–1836 and Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby’s Extremities: Painting Empire in 
Post-Revolutionary France point to Edward Said’s legacy in helping to shape and redirect 
discourses. Their work, in particular Grimaldo Grigsby’s, speak to the possibilities of refining 
Said’s thesis and providing it with more nuance, greater complexity – if that is at all possible, 
given Edward Said – and far greater inclusivity. Take, for a moment, Ledbury’s assertion that the 
deep analyses in both these works are made possible by  

 
a path made feasible by the profound influence of Edward Said’s discussion of how the 
physical expansion of empires and colonization of peoples in the latter half of the 
nineteenth century was foreshadowed and prepared by a cultural creation of the Oriental 
“Other.” 

 
This should be coupled with Grimaldo Grigsby’s reconceptualization of that “Orient” as 
encompassing spaces as far afield as Greece, Egypt, Senegal, and Haiti; and specifically adding 
the “black” – the African – into an explicit demography she defines as “Oriental.” Grimaldo 
Grigsby’s attention to race in this quite bold way seems a game-changer in regards to how one 
might define – or re-define, and re-discover – the “Orient,” and re-articulate Orientalism.13 

The new historiography epitomized in Grimaldo Grigsby’s work – an historiography 
characterized by close readings in material culture – offer what Ledbury calls the possibility to 
“complicate the discourse of the ‘colonizer and colonized.’”14 Would that it prompted the 
“colonized” to speak; or that their speech was recognized, given that they do “speak,” in spite of 
the imaging of others. However, their own prodigious efforts notwithstanding, this is not what 
either Porterfield or Grimaldo Grigsby achieve. Theirs is not an interrogation of the subject; it is 
the artist/author that is central to their inquiries. Yet they – in particular, Grimaldo Grigsby – 
broaden the context of the Orient; diversify its demography; literally, provide more color; and 
imply greater agency for the subjects of empire. Here, the stage is set for another type of 
interrogation of Gérôme. 

It is here that Ledbury evokes Walter Friedlaender in his own observations of the “nature and 
complexities” of “Orientalisms,” plural.15 In that, Ledbury urges us to “countenance [the] 
extremities of interpretation.” For the critics of “Orientalism” this could mean the inclusion of 
Africa and Africans as “oriental” – even “Arab,” “Turk,” “Persian,” “Mughal.”16 This might be 
the “wedge” that prompts all sides to let these “subjects” speak. It allows for the question of 
“What does the act of ‘posing’ – the ‘pose’ – say? What is the ‘agency’ inherent in the 
poser/subject? What are the powers inherent in self-representation; what do demeanor, dress, 
armament, accoutrement, say of presence and power?” 

In other words – those explicitly of Ledbury, and implicitly of Grimaldo Grigsby – when does 
the subject “transgress”? Does the subject, through pose and depiction, suggest a potential threat 
to empire? Does the subject resist the “unabashedly propagandistic” assumptions conventionally 
attributed to these works from all quarters? Does the subject and the pose – imagined or not – 



Re-“art”-iculating Orientalism  66 
 

constitute an unconscious manifestation of “propaganda” in its own right – not on the part of the 
author/artist, but on that of the poser/subject? Has the image – in that cultural cliché – taken on 
“a life of its own”? Is it displaying a life that it possessed prior to its “orientalization”? These 
questions take us back to the Gérôme piece that fronts this essay, The Snake Charmer (1880) 
(see Figure 1, page 61). 

The dissemination of The Snake Charmer probably reached its widest possible audience as the 
cover for Said’s Orientalism. There, I believe it helped to convey the message inherent in Said’s 
critique, the construction of the “Orient.” This “Orient” was a political economic device intended 
to justify empire, its excesses, its definitions, and its structures through its imaging of the 
“other.” In this space, it might be argued that the conventional readings of this piece achieve just 
that across the political spectrum. 

Conventionally, we are treated to an imaging of this “Oriental” world that is dissolute, 
decadent, debauched, and in decline. If one were to explore the psycho-sexual along the lines of 
Grimaldo Grigsby, homosexuality and pedophilia are inscripted as well. However, in the vein of 
Said’s appeal that we talk seriously, yet without conjuring interpretations that Ledbury might 
label “extreme,” there is at least one other reading in this decrepit band of men that lends itself to 
Grimaldo Grigsby’s expanded definition of the “Orient.” The composition the group – its 
demography – challenges the conventions of traditional definitions of the “Orient” and 
“Orientals,” center, left and right. 

Some of the men in this painting are quite dark – black, even. Phenotypically, they might be 
racialized as “African”; yet, “culturally,” they are “Oriental,” even “Arab.” Gérôme presents this 
possibility over and over. A Street Scene in Cairo (see Figure 2 below), Dispute d’[sic]Arabes 
(see Figure 3 below), Old Clothing Merchant (see Figure 4, page 66), The Dance of the Almeh 
(see Figure 5, page 66) all illustrate this – they complicate the notions of the “Orient,” the 
“Oriental,” and the “Arab.” The complication occurs in ways that are mundane, commonplace, 
“ordinary.” They are there; mostly men. Men being entertained; men in commerce; men in 
dispute. Their ordinary, commonplace comings and goings actually strengthen their organic 
presence in these compositions, and undergird my argument about the ubiquity that presence. 
They are there because this is their world; they are there because this is their “Orient.” 

 
Figure 2: Jean‐Léon Gérôme, Street Scene in Cairo (1871)  Figure 3: Jean‐Léon Gérôme, 

  Dispute d’Arabes (1871) 



67  Keita 
 

  

                Figure 5: Jean‐Léon Gérôme, Dance of the Almeh (1863) 

 

Figure 4: Jean‐Léon Gérôme, Old Clothing Merchant (1866) 

 
Yet, this particular reading of Gérôme does nothing to nuance the post-discursive critique of 

Said other than to argue that the subjects of empire are diverse, and that they interact; they 
engage one another. 

One needs to get closer to Gérôme. I wonder about Gérôme’s critics and what they saw. I 
wonder if they and I see the same things, yet read them differently, but similarly; if they see 
images that disturb the possible order of empire, while I marvel in the political economic 
aesthetics of its disruption? Clearly, while I see the precision and technical genius of these 
pieces, I am not given to disposition of a rather clinical “coldness” that many have ascribed to 
them. On the contrary, in spite of my own rather radical persuasion, I find myself seduced by 
Gérôme’s work – taken by their warmth, their vibrancy, by the fact that some of his subjects 
cannot be contained or restrained. Again, they are “dangerous.” 

Writing in 1904, in commemoration of Gérôme’s passing, R. W. Glessner spoke of the critical 
reduction of Gérôme and his work to that of a “second-rate master,” in spite of the fact that his 
work was “the quintessence of refinement as regards execution,” and yet, possibly because – and 
this in my speculation – he was also regarded as a populist painter. “[H]e was always pre-
eminently a painter for the multitude.”17 What was it that a “multitude,” in the context of 
imperial France – or empire anywhere – might walk away with having encountered the work of 
Gérôme? Clearly, not all of it, but enough of it might reveal the tensions between the conscious 
and unconsciously “formulated political programs”? Might an audience muse – in part – on the 
power arrayed against empire, rather than simply the right to it? 

Consider, for a moment his subjects – in particular, the males; and then, specifically, the black 
males. Many of them are men-at-arms. In spite of The Snake Charmer (or possibly in subtle 
concert with it, given the array of weapons in this motley crew’s possession), these subjects are 
confident and self-possessed. 



Re-“art”-iculating Orientalism  68 
 

Black men-at-arms. Presented by an “Orientalist.” How should the “Orient,” the “Oriental,” 
and the “Orientalized” space be reconsidered from this starting point – from this “standpoint,” to 
evoke Schumacher? If we thought of Lyotard, here, the “standpoint” of the subject – his (or her) 
“posting” – a “post” in Lyoyard’s “Postmodernity,” is the position from which the critique of 
one’s circumstances begins. That critique is the break with those circumstances – a challenge to 
them.18 Do the gazes of Gérôme’s subjects challenge? Do they resist colonial imposition? Do 
they defy the propaganda of imperial subservience – and, in a black face, no less? How is the 
“subaltern” known, and re-known? Here, I want to play on the notion of the subaltern in military 
parlance – a person of power and significant force – as much a possible detriment to the fortunes 
of empire, as an expeditor of them. Take the implications of Lt. Colonel Edward Money, 
Imperial Ottoman Army, Late Captain Bashi-Bazouks’ tale of twelve months among such men-
at-arms. 

Figure 6: Ottoman postcard, Bachibozouks (date unknown) 

[W]ild animals [...] their insanity [...] every man, besides being booted and spurred wore 
a sword, pistols, dagger or knife as the case might be [...] a murderous looking carbine 
about seven feet long [...] and his steed awaiting him outside [...] their remarkable skill 
in horsemanship [...] this power [...]19 



69  Keita 
 

  

Lt. Colonel Edward Money notwithstanding. Sharp and long blades aside; pistols sashed; 
rifles slung; dogs [?] leashed; the real power – the real “danger” – in Gérôme’s work lay in the 
subjects’ gaze – rather than that of the artist/author. What if the subjects “engage” the 
author/artist, and in so doing, engage the empire – in fact, confront it? What if their gaze is not 
one of submission or docility, but pride; even fierceness, determination? What if they stare back, 
eyes unlowered? Is this the subtle, yet not so subtle, razored-edge of resistance?  Here, Glessner 
celebrates the realism inherent to many of Gérôme’s pieces; their “savoring [...] of [...] the power 
of man."20 Which “man”? Which “men”?  

Glessner goes on to quote Delacroix to illustrate the perception of Gérôme’s power: the ability 
to “transform an odious thing to a thing of art.”21 This is the ability to “transform” the black 
body into a thing of power (of course, it already was/is, yet for the conscious political project of 
imaging empire, and the public it was to “serve,” this could not be the convention). This was the 
placement of black bodies, and all they imply, within the purview of the “Orient.” And then, 
unwittingly – or so it would seem – to bid these bodies to “speak”; to acknowledge their gaze. 
And in that gaze, their power. 

Figure 7: Jean‐Léon Gérôme, The Bashi Bozouk (1869) 



Re-“art”-iculating Orientalism  70 
 

The Bashi Bazouk (1868, see Figure 7, page 68) – sometimes, more pointedly, The Black 
Bashi Bazouk – both the image, and its more phenotypically directed eponym, tell a story. The 
painting aside, what does some critic’s titling of this work as “black” tell us of a certain class of 
military personnel in the “Orient”? Does it suggest a variegated demography which has simply 
not been adequately analyzed within the context of the given conceptual space? Does the Bashi 
Bazouk evoke power in his own right? The “Bashi-Bazouk!” “Captain Haddock.” Tintin – 
sourced in popular culture, but not quite sufficiently “racially” othered? What might that mean? 
How might such a racial awareness – an awareness of difference in this “Orient” – alter our 
terms of engagement, and the kinds of analyses and critiques that might flow from such 
adjustments? 

If Gérôme has “captured” his subjects, what is it he has “caught”? And are he and his 
audiences aware of the “catch” – its powers, its dangers? As in Lt. Colonel Money’s description, 
this man is armed to the teeth. The carbine off the left shoulder; pommels of pistols and knives 
protruding from his cummerbund. Money’s allusions are bound up in turn-of-the-nineteenth 
century depictions that helped to shape not only the “Orient” but the medieval and chivalry as 
well. Here, Sir Walter Scott’s “orientals” are also black men of considerable force and 
malevolence. In part, their dangerousness is known through their elegance; the ease of their 
luxuriant posture. Their “silver” and “silks”; their dangerous and exotic weapons; their exquisite 
and extraordinary mounts – the very things that a Renaissance Europe would covet and that a 
modern Europe would seek through expropriation – were forces of their definition.22 

Gérôme’s Bashi-Bazouk is of the same type; he is in pedigree. There are his weapons. There 
is the opulence of his silks; the flash of his headgear. Then, there is his gaze. His demeanor, what 
a French public might ascribe to as his “hauteur” – the disregard – the arrogance, as it were – of 
a subject person. The “posture” (again, with Lyotard in the background) of a “subservient” who 
either had not recognized his subservience or had chosen to resist it. Here is the “Oriental” 
subverting the “Orient” and a host of accompanying racial presumptions. This gaze might be 
charged as a “postmodern” statement – a resistance to colonialism and its structures. 
 
* * * * * 
 
The point here is not complicated. If while sitting in Oxford, Paris, 

 
or New York you tell Arabs or Africans that they belong to a basically sick or 
unregenerate culture, you are unlikely to convince them, they are not going to concede 
to you your essential superiority or your right to rule them despite your evident wealth 
and power.23 

 
Full circle. In the call for serious discussion, Said is quite right here. And while I recognize that I 
may have posed more questions than answers to what Said and others propose as critique of our 
situation, as a refinement – if I might be so bold – I offer that the critique – the resistance to 



71  Keita 
 

  

domination, imperialism, empire – is not as “contemporary” as it might seem. It is historical. It is 
caught up in the gaze of those assumed to be dominated by the mechanisms of empire. These 
“images of the past – pure and impure” – as Said puts it, are contiguous with the first acts of 
empire. Resistance is an act of simultaneity. This is one reading that Djebar provides for us.24 

Figure 8: Jean‐Léon Gérôme, The Master of the Hounds (1871) 

 
The Master of the Hounds (see Figure 8 above) – or the Black Master of the Hounds, as some 

would have it (again, another set of readings for another time and space), closes this piece. To 
some degree, Gérôme’s subject might be separated from the other figures discussed here. He is 



Re-“art”-iculating Orientalism  72 
 

not a Bashi-Bazouk. He seems to have no association with the mercenary; useful fellows when 
led by European officers to achieve European ends. Ostensibly, he is no brigand, though one 
might imagine him moving easily “outside” the law. His presence in regard to the legitimacies of 
the imperial state is liminal. 

He resides at an “edge” not because he lacks status, or is anonymous; even though, Gérôme 
has given him no name. We know him. He is “liminal” because within the conscious political 
propaganda of empire he is neither obedient nor humble. Look at him. What “prescribed” “codes 
of conduct” might he follow? We might even argue that his “dress” is outside the “decorum” of 
empire even as it emphasizes the “exoticism” of imperial space. It subverts it. 

Look at him. Where is the subservience in this figure? What has he allowed Gérôme to say to 
us of his condition – his “status”? In another age, his posture, his gait, his gaze, would suggest 
that he had “commissioned” Gérôme – that Gérôme was in his service – not the other way round. 

What does this black man – his demeanor, even that of his dogs – say to us of an “Orient” that 
those like Gérôme sought to construct, even “capture,” yet could not completely control? How 
does this black man, turbaned, in his silks, elegantly armed, and accoutered by his hounds, 
complicate all notions of the “Orient” and “Orientals”? 

The answer to these questions will never exonerate Gérôme and his fellow Orientalists. But, 
the questions themselves serve as a caution for those of us who seek to interrogate and refine our 
own conceptual space. Engagement with Said’s thesis through Gérôme may force sightings of 
what is “hidden in plain sight.” Men and women who defy convention, who stare back and make 
their presence known. 

 
Notes 

1. The author requests that his words are not to be cited without his permission. 

2. Al-Baladhuri (ed. Muhammad Hamidulla), cited in Bernard Lewis, “The African Diaspora and 
Civilization of Islam,” in The African Diaspora: Interpretive Essays, eds. Martin L. Kilson and 
Robert I. Rotberg (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 44. 

3. Al-Jahiz (Abu Uthman Amr ibn Bahr al-Kinani al-Fuqaimi al-Basri), “The Superiority of Blacks 
over Whites,” in The Life and Works of Jahiz: Translations of Selected Texts, translated by 
Charles Pellat, translated from the French by D. M. Hawke (Berkeley and Los Angeles: 
University of California Press, 1969), 196. 

4. Edward Said, “Roads Taken and Not Taken in Contemporary Criticism", Contemporary 
Literature 17.3, Directions for Criticism: Structuralism and Its Alternatives (Summer 1976), 332. 

5. Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century: The Structures of Everyday 
Life, The Limits of the Possible, Volume I (New York and Cambridge: Harper and Row, 1979). 
Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century: The Perspective of the World, 
Volume III (New York and Cambridge: Harper and Row, 1979), 387, 430–441. Aside from an 
early dismissal of Africa in her much heralded work, Abu-Lughod’s following references to the 
continent and, presumably its peoples, are the obstacles that they pose to an emergent European 



73  Keita 
 

  

political economy. Like Braudel, for her, the TransSaharan trade is of no importance, and the 
commercial city-states of East Africa are only peripheral nodes of Indian Ocean commerce that 
have little bearing on a narrative that purports to focus on the period “before European 
hegemony.” Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: the World System A.D. 1250–1350 
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 36, 121, 169, 188, 208, 243. Ann 
Ducille, “Discourse and Dat-course: Postcoloniality and Afrocentricity,” in Skin Trade 
(Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1996), 120–135. 

6. Frank M. Snowden, Jr., Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience 
(Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University 
Press, 1970). Frank M. Snowden, Jr., Before Color Prejudice: the Ancient View of Blacks 
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). Martin Bernal, Black Athena: the Afroasiatic 
Roots of Classical Civilization, Volume I (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987). 
Maghan Keita, Race and the Writing of History: Riddling the Sphinx (Oxford and New York: 
Oxford University Press, 2000). 

7. Jeremy Lawrence, “The Middle Indies: Damião de Góis on Prester John and the Ethiopians,” 
Renaissance Studies, 6 (1992), 3–4. Chandra Richard De Silva, “Indian Ocean but not African 
Sea: the Erasure of East African Commerce from History,” Journal of Black Studies 29.5 (May 
1999). 

8. Ahmad b. Abi Ya'qub b.Ja'far b. Wadih, Tarikh, in Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West 
African History [hereafter simply referred to as “Corpus”], eds. Nehemiah Levtzion and J. F. P. 
Hopkins (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2000), 21. Abu Bakr Ahmad b. Muhammad al-
Hamadhani (called Ibn al-Faqih), Mukhtasar Kitab al-Buldan, in Corpus, 27. Abu 'l-Qasim 
Muhammad al-Nusaybi (also known as Ibn Hawqal), Kitab Surat al-ard, in Corpus, 45–52. Abu 
'Ubayd 'Abd Allah b. 'Abd al-'Aziz al-Bakri, Kitab al-masalik wa- 'l-mamalik , in Corpus, 77. Leo 
Africanus, A Geographical Historie of Africa (1600: Amsterdam; New York: Da Capo Press; 
Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, Ltd., 1969). One of the most famous passages of Leo Africanus on the 
intellectual life and market of Timbuktu both underscores and highlights the point: “Here are 
great store of doctors, judges, priests, and other learned men, that are bountifully maintained at 
the kings [sic] cost and charges. And hither are brought divers manuscripts or written books out 
of Barbarie, which are sold for more money then [sic] any other merchandize [sic]” in Corpus 
288 (italics added). Said Hamdun and Noel King, Ibn Battuta in Black Africa (Princeton: Markus 
Wiener Publishers, 2005). Abu Zayd 'Abd al-Rahman Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddima in Corpus, 319–
322. Ibn Khaldun, Kitab al-'Ibarra aw-diwan al-mubtada' wa-'l-Khabarovsk fi ayyam al-'arab 
wa-'l-'Adam wa-'l-barbar in Corpus, 322–342. 

 Nehemiah Levtzion, “Ibn Hawqal, the Cheque and Awdaghost,” Journal of African History 9 
(1968), 223–233. E. Ann McDougall, “The View from Awdaghost: War, Trade, and Social 
Change for the Eighth thought the Fifteenth Century,” Journal of African History 26 (1985), 8–
13, 26. Michael Brett, “Islam and Trade in Bilad al Sudan, Tenth and Eleventh Century A. D., 
Journal of African History 24 (1983).  

 Umar Al-Naqar, “Takrur, the History of a Name,” Journal of African History 10.3 (1969), 367. 
Jere L. Bacharach, “African Military Slaves in the Medieval Middle East,” International Journal 
of Middle East Studies 13.4 (Nov. 1981), 471–495. Daniel Pipes, Slave Soldiers and Islam: 



Re-“art”-iculating Orientalism  74 
 

Genesis of a Military System (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981). Daniel 
Pipes, “Black Soldiers in Early Muslim Armies,” International Journal of African Historical 
Studies 13.1 (1980), 87–94. Here, we also need to keep in mind Africans who were part of 
Islam’s eastward expansion as well. These would include the Zanj of Iraq and the Habshis and 
Siddis of India. See al-Tabari, Revolt of the Zanj. Alexandre Popovic, The Revolt of the African 
Slaves in the 3rd/9th Century (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1999). Shanti Sadiq Ali, 
The African Dispersal in the Deccan From Medieval to Modern Times (Hyderabad: Orient 
Longman Limited, 1996). Shihan De. S. Jayasuriya and Richard Pankhurst, eds., The African 
Diaspora in the Indian Ocean (Trenton: Africa World Press, Inc., 2003). 

Also John Hunwick, “The same but different: Africans in slavery in the Mediterranean Muslim 
world,” in John Hunwick and Eve Trout Powell, The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean 

Lands of Islam (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2002), xiii. 

The compartmentalization of Africa into zones that are treated as “Middle East” and “Africa” is a 
legacy of Orientalism and colonialism. North Africa, including Egypt, is usually seen as forming 
part of the Middle East, though Middle East experts are not generally keen to venture farther west 
than the confines of Egypt. Northwestern Africa — the Maghreb — is generally regarded as 
peripheral to Middle Eastern studies and extraneous to African studies. . . . Northwestern Africa 
(from Morocco to Libya), despite the area’s close and enduring relationship with West Africa, has 
been excluded from the concerns of most Africanists. 

9. Edward Said, “The Imperial Spectacle,” Grand Street 6.2 (Winter 1987), 90, 92, 97, 100–101. 

10. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “On Saracen Enjoyment: Some Fantasies of Race in Late Medieval France 
and England,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31:1 (Winter 2001), 113–46. 

11. Sibel Bozdoğan, “Journey to the East: Ways of Looking at the Orient and the Question of 
Representation,” Journal of Architectural Education (1984-) 41.4 (Summer 1988), 38–39. 
Bozdoğan’s inquiries, through Schumacher and his use of “standpoint,” bring to bear at least one 
interpretation of “post-discourse,” and Lyotard’s treatment of the “Postmodern” and then the 
possible consequent rendering of subaltern conceptualizations. Lyotard’s use of “post” has 
multiple meanings and implications, among which are the notions of “posting” or “positioning” – 
the acquisition – even the commandeering of “space” from which “critique” is realized and 
enacted. Schumacher’s “standpoint” seems to suggest just that. Jean-François Lyotard, The 
Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota 
Press, 1977). Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence 1982–1985 
(Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 3, 6, 15. 

12. Linda Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” in The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century 
Art and Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 33–59. 

13. Mark Ledbury, Review of Todd Porterfield, The Allure of Empire: Art in the Service of French 
Imperialism 1798–1836 and Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-
Revolutionary France, The Art Bulletin, 86.3 (Sep. 2004), 603–608. 

14. Ledbury 2004, 606, 607. 

15. Ledbury 2004, 603. 



75  Keita 
 

  

16. This observation is in keeping with the most recent work of Eve Troutt Powell, but it is supported 
by an extensive historical record that places African “bodies” and culture in all of these cultural 
and socio-political economic domains. See Eve Troutt Powell, This is My Memory: Stories of 
Enslavement from Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Empire (Stanford, CA: Stanford University 
Press, 2012). See also Hunwick and Powell 2002. Maghan Keita, “Africans and Asians: 
Historiography and the Long View of Global Interaction,” The Journal of World History 16.1 
(2005). 

17. R. W. Glessner, "The Passing of Jean Léon Gérôme," Brush and Pencil 14.1 (Apr. 1904), 54–56. 

18. Lyotard 1992, 3, 6, 15. 

19. Edward Money, Twelve Months with the Bashi-Bazouks (1857; London: Newman and Company, 
1880), 10–11, 27–29. This citation is a pastiche of Colonel Money’s colorful descriptions of his 
Bashi-Bazouk troopers. 

20. Glessner 1904, 58. 

21. Glessner 1904, 63. 

22. Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1832), 39, 40–41. Maghan Keita, 
“Missing Chapters in Afro-Medievalism, or What the Bookstore Hid,” in Why the Middle Ages 
Matter, ed. Simon Doubleday (London: Routledge, 2011), 137–138. 

23. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 19. 

24. Said 1993, 15. Assia Djebar, Fantasia, an Algerian Cavalcade (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 
1993). 


