Thread by @MichaelDPress

Something tells me this might not be the most helpful way to describe European and American interactions with "the Orient" in the 19th century.
(From the British Museum's description of its exhibition "Inspired by the East", opening October 10)
britishmuseum.org/whats_on/exhib…

I mean, on one level Orientalism is just 1 instance of different cultures meeting and understanding each other in biased ways -- but to remove it from the context of power and imperialism completely misses why it was (and still is) so damaging.
Perhaps not surprising for the BM?

This is the only description of Orientalism on the page, and it's oddly neutral to positive.

Anyone unfamiliar with Orientalism would read this and wonder, "Why would anyone want to subvert it?"

In any case, this exhibition is an interesting collaboration with the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia and I'm waiting to hear more about it.
britishmuseum.org/whats_on/exhib…

In a shocker, it turns out that the BM's exhibition page wasn't an aberration in its largely non-critical look at Orientalism.
Here are 2 blog posts (1 from July, 1 from yesterday) by the exhibition co-curators:
blog.britishmuseum.org/how-did-the-is…
blog.britishmuseum.org/an-introductio…

Is it me, or is this presentation of Said's Orientalism a bit watered down?

One of the blog posts repeats the descripton from the exhibition page about 19th century Europeans and Americans going overseas to *learn*!

And both share a line about how "colonial interests" allowed "greater access".
Absolutely nothing here about the integral connection between how those representations were integrally tied to imperialism and power, and helped justify them.

Clearly what the world needed was yet *another* exhibition devoted to an anodyne look at how the "Orient" influenced European and American art. 🙄

There is one place where the wording of these posts seems more aggressive: on representations of the harem and sexism.

But the "invasive attention" as "a metaphor for the Orientalist approach to the region" alludes to the rest of the underlying problem without addressing it.

How surprising to find this exhibition being promoted with, shall we say, inflated claims:
smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/wor…

https://twitter.com/cobbpasha/status/1182312166722027520

At first I thought this was just like the time Smithsonian Mag claimed that Girault de Prangey's 1844 photographs of Jerusalem were the very first taken
(In fact, it's well established that the earliest photos of the city were taken 5 years earlier.)
smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/see…

But then I saw that Smithsonian Magazine was simply following previous headlines, using the same exact phrase ("world's first travel guide")

And from the CNN article we see that the hype goes back -- at least in part -- to a BM curator:
cnn.com/travel/article…