Overview
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Arabic-speaking regions of the Ottoman Empire saw a crucial change in attitudes towards sexuality. Notions of ‘respectability’, ‘propriety’ and ‘sexual morality’ were being transformed in literary and cultural discourses, a shift that was related to the gradual rise in anti-Ottoman Arab nationalism. However, contemporary Orientalists such as Sir Richard Burton and T.E. Lawrence were oblivious to certain aspects of this process of cultural reconfiguration. While accounts of male-love poetry (ghazal al-mudhakkar) were being gradually expurgated from the Arab literary heritage, elaborate narratives of Oriental homoerotic desire distinctively characterise the encounters of both Burton and Lawrence with the Arab East. By comparing their literary and autobiographical accounts of the Arab Orient with contemporary Arabic literature, Feras Alkabani is able to expose this critical disparity in cross-cultural portrayals of sexual morality and homoerotic desire. Alkabani relates the conflicting agendas of contemporary Orientalists and Arab scholars to the shifts in international imperial power relations and the eventual collapse of the Ottoman Empire. His detailed comparative study reveals the significance of homoerotic desire within Orientalist and Arab literary discourses at a time when the meaning and connotations of poetic male-love were undergoing a critical change in Arab culture and literature. It will prove invaluable for those researching Orientalism, nationalism, imperialism and manifestations of homoerotic desire in the fin-de-siècle Middle East.
Full Product Details
Author: Dr Feras Alkabani (University of Sussex, UK)
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Imprint: I.B. Tauris
Dimensions:
Width: 15.60cm
, Height: 2.50cm
, Length: 23.40cm
ISBN: 9781784535698
ISBN 10: 1784535699
Pages: 296
Publication Date: 17 October 2024
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Manufactured on demand
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.
Reviews
Fantasies of perverse sexuality forged relations between the Anglo-European and Arab worlds, with both cultures projecting lurid aberrations (and abominations) on the Other in an ever oscillating dance between desire and repulsion. With subtlety, keen insight, and close attention to Burton and Lawrence’s highly partial ethnography and loaded translations, Feras Alkabani tracks the fluctuations of this unappeasable mutual curiosity. Reading the two famous Orientalists in the context of their Arabic contemporaries and later writers, he is able to explore the strong, historical shifts and exchanges in attitudes to same-sex relations. This is scholarship characterised throughout by an appealing empathy for the human subject, whatever their gender or orientation or ethnicity. -- Marina Warner, Professor of English and Creative Writing, Birkbeck College, London, UK and Distinguished Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford, UK In this wonderfully erudite and profound work, Feras Alkabani explores the nuances and paradoxes of the maverick Orientalism of Sir Richard Burton and T.E. Lawrence. Paying particular attention to the homoerotic motivations of the two scholar-adventurers, this book illuminates anachronistic tensions between fantasy and historical experience so as to add much intricacy to our understandings of Euro-Arab cultural encounters. * Caroline Rooney, Professor, University of Kent, UK * Illuminating. Richard Burton, T. E. Lawrence and the Culture of Homoerotic Desire is an original, nuanced reading of cross-cultural encounters between the British and Arab in the long nineteenth century that shaped discourses on modernity in two entangled cultural spheres. Through the prism of the ‘Orient’ as theatre and ‘Orientalism’ as masquerade, Feras Alkabani stages the British and Arab cultural, historical and political entanglement in the conversations about homoerotic desire between British adventurers in the Orient, Richard Burton and T. E. Lawrence, and Arab travellers to Europe, Rifa'a al-Tahtawi and Muhammad b. 'Abdallah al-Saffar, and unveils the ways in which the allure of and romance with cultural difference underpin liberatory discourses on self and other, imperialism and nationalism, and modernity and tradition, equally in Victorian Britain and Nahdawi Arab world. A must-read for anyone interested in Orientalism, European modernism, and Arab nationalism. * Wen-chin Ouyang, Professor, SOAS, UK *
Fantasies of perverse sexuality forged relations between the Anglo-European and Arab worlds, with both cultures projecting lurid aberrations (and abominations) on the Other in an ever-oscillating dance between desire and repulsion. With subtlety, keen insight, and close attention to Burton and Lawrence’s highly partial ethnography and loaded translations, Feras Alkabani tracks the fluctuations of this unappeasable mutual curiosity. Reading the two famous Orientalists in the context of their Arabic contemporaries and later writers, he is able to explore the strong, historical shifts and exchanges in attitudes to same-sex relations. This is scholarship characterised throughout by an appealing empathy for the human subject, whatever their gender or orientation or ethnicity. * Marina Warner, Professor of English and Creative Writing, Birkbeck College, London, UK and Distinguished Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford, UK * In this wonderfully erudite and profound work, Feras Alkabani explores the nuances and paradoxes of the maverick Orientalism of Sir Richard Burton and T.E. Lawrence. Paying particular attention to the homoerotic motivations of the two scholar-adventurers, this book illuminates anachronistic tensions between fantasy and historical experience so as to add much intricacy to our understandings of Euro-Arab cultural encounters. * Caroline Rooney, Professor Emeritus of African and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Kent, UK * Illuminating. Richard Burton, T. E. Lawrence and the Culture of Homoerotic Desire is an original, nuanced reading of cross-cultural encounters between the British and the Arabs in the long nineteenth century that shaped discourses on modernity in two entangled cultural spheres. Through the prism of the ‘Orient’ as theatre and ‘Orientalism’ as masquerade, Feras Alkabani stages the British and Arab cultural, historical and political entanglement in the conversations about homoerotic desire between British adventurers in the Orient, Richard Burton and T.E. Lawrence, and Arab travellers to Europe, Rifa?a al-Tahtawi and Muhammad b. ?Abdallah al-Saffar, and unveils the ways in which the allure of and romance with cultural difference underpin liberatory discourses on self and other, imperialism and nationalism, and modernity and tradition, equally in Victorian Britain and Nahdawi Arab world. A must-read for anyone interested in Orientalism, European modernism, and Arab nationalism. * Wen-chin Ouyang, Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London, UK *
In this wonderfully erudite and profound work, Feras Alkabani explores the nuances and paradoxes of the maverick Orientalism of Sir Richard Burton and T.E. Lawrence. Paying particular attention to the homoerotic motivations of the two scholar-adventurers, this book illuminates anachronistic tensions between fantasy and historical experience so as to add much intricacy to our understandings of Euro-Arab cultural encounters. * Caroline Rooney, Professor, University of Kent, UK *
Author Information
Feras Alkabani is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Sussex, where he co-directs the Middle East and North Africa Centre at Sussex (MENACS). He is a Trustee of the British Society of Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES) and a member of the Editorial Board of the Mashriq & Mahjar: Journal of Middle East and North African Migration Studies (North Carolina State University).
