Essay on Timothy Mitchell - Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order

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Timothy Mitchell – Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order (1989)

It is no longer unusual to suggeste that the construction of the colonial order is related to the eloboration of modern forms of representation and knowledge
( This has been examined by critique of Orientalism

Best known analysis on Orientalism: Edward Said

Orientalist world is defined by: 1. It is understood as the product of unchanging racial / cultural essences/ characteristics 2. These characteristics are always the opposite of the West (passive/ active, static/ mobile, emotional/ rational, chaotic/ ordered) 3. Oriental ismarked by fundamental absences (of movement, reason, order, meaning)
( In terms of these characteristics the colonial world can
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It was completely transformed to serve the production of a single commodity

The age of exhibition was the colonial age: The age of world economy and global power in which we live, since what was to be made available as exhibit was reality, the world itself

The East Itself

If Europe was becoming the world-as-exhibition, what happened to Europeans who went abroad to visit places whose images they had already encountered in books, spectacles and exhibitions?

Flaubert: Described Cairo itself as a chaos of color and detail that refuses to compose itself as a picture
( He tried to grasp the real thing as a picture

By trying to make sense of things, visitors would stand back and take pictures or make drawings
( Finding a good viewpoint to overlook and capture things becomes important

To see without being seen: To represent something as Oriental, or to establish the