European Modernity and the Arab Mediterranean: Toward a New Philology and a Counter-Orientalism

Over the past decade, scholars have vigorously reconsidered the history of Orientalism, and though Edward Said's hugely influential work remains a touchstone of the discussion, Karla Mallette notes, it can no longer be taken as the final word on Western perceptions of the Islamic East. The French and British Orientalisms that Said studied in particular were shaped by the French and British colonial projects in Muslim regions; nations that did not have such investments in the Middle East generated significantly different perceptions of Islamic and Arabic culture.

European Modernity and the Arab Mediterranean examines Orientalist philological scholarship of southern Europe produced between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth century. In Italy, Spain, and Malta, Mallette argues, a regional history of Arab occupation during the Middle Ages gave scholars a focus different from that of their northern European colleagues; in studying the Arab world, they were not so much looking on a distant and radically different history as seeking to reconstruct the past of their own nations. She demonstrates that in specific instances, Orientalists wrote their nations' Arab history as the origin of modern national identity, depicting Islamic thought not as exterior to European modernity but rather as formative of and central to it.

Joining comparative insights to the analytic strategies and historical genius of philology, Mallette ranges from the complex manuscript history of the Thousand and One Nights to the invention of the Maltese language and Spanish scholarship on Dante and Islam. Throughout, she reveals the profound influences Arab and Islamic traditions have had on the development of modern European culture. European Modernity and the Arab Mediterranean is an engaging study that sheds new light on the history of Orientalism, the future of philology, and the postcolonial Middle Ages.

Author: Karla Mallette
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 06/15/2010
Pages: 328
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.40lbs
Size: 8.80h x 5.70w x 0.30d
ISBN: 9780812242416

Review Citation(s):
Choice 01/01/2011

About the Author
Karla Mallette is Associate Professor of Italian and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of The Kingdom of Sicily, 1100-1250: A Literary History, also published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.