Colonialism, orientalism and the canon - Rethinking The Canon

The novel inquiry in art and architectural history that center upon "rethinking the canon" is closely linked with the common focus on sociocultural intersections of the "Western" and "non-Western" worlds. This is clearly manifested, for example, in the growing inclusion of non-Western art and architecture in review courses.(1) Considering art and architecture within the broadened parameters of intricate power relations has followed in a refraining of the canon and fresh readings of it. On the whole, this does not mean that the traditional perspective has been replaced, on the contrary that additional ways of seeing and understanding works of art and architecture have been introduced. Although at times the repositioning looks to render the conventional interpretations out of date in its essence it solitary exposes meanings hitherto excluded from the discourse. Perhaps this proces can best be explained by means of a technical term borrowed from engineering and adapted through sociology as a research tool: triangulation. Triangulation, used in land surveying to determine a position, tenders the possibility of multiple readings in history. In Janet Abu-Lughod's words, triangulation is based upon the understanding that "there is no archimedian point outside the a whole from which to view historic reality."(2)

Undoubtedly, Edward Said's Orientalism (1979) marked a turning point in the awareness we have of viewing cultural proceedss through a lens that highlights the underlining politics of domination. Art and architectural history have replyed to Said's challenge, albeit upon a more subdued scale than a certain quantity of other academic fields. Not surprisingly, plenteous of this recent scholarship come [i]or[/i] go after [i]or[/i] behinds the model established by Orientalism and engages in a series of analyses focusing upon works of art and architecture that contribute to the construction of an "Orient." As Said himself stated, Orientalism was a application of mind of the "West" alone. It was not intended as a cross-cultural examination and did not claim to give voice to the "other" side - an issue Said addressed in his later writings.(3) Art historians have followed him and presented innovative and critical readings of Orientalism, on the other hand always focusing on the "West."(4)

To introduce novel viewing positions on the map by dint of listening to historically repressed voices complicates any neat framing of the canon, engages it in an unfamiliar and uncomfortable dialogue, and resituates it. notwithstanding the fruits are worth the effort. Here are sum of two units case studies: an 1830s urban design intervention in a colonial setting, the city of Algiers; and the thematic repertory of a turn-of-the-century "Orientalist" Ottoman artist, Osman Hamdi. Colonialism and Orientalism are newcomer to the discourse. While their inclusion displays the broadening in the definition of the canon, "rethinking the canon" is also about breaking end conventional interpretations.

Algiers was the capital of France's greatest in quantity important and most problematic territorial possession outre-mer The colonial city par pre-eminence its "modernization" was particularly charged with political overtones. The first episode of French planning that followed the overthrow of Algeria in 1830 germinated the conflicts that would surface sporadically until the extreme point of French rule in 1962 The French began their urban renewal of the city by the agency of opening an immense area, a Place Royale or Place d'Armes (later, Place du Gouvernement) in the heart of the city and easily accessible from the harbor - in order to assemble the numbers The initial clearing was random and proceeded in an irregular plaza with haphazard boundaries, shortly deemed unworthy of representing the glory of France. A series of shoot forwards in the 1830s and 1840 that attempted to regularize this space into a neat geometric form, environed by buildings of uniform height with classical details and arcades upon the ground level, responded to the call by means of the French administrators for an appropriate monumentality. The resulting Place du Gouvernement with its grand image and efficiency, was accompanied by means of the enlargement of three existing ways all converging on the novel square: rue Bab el-Oued, deplore Bab Azzoun, and rue de la Marine, now lined with "French-style" buildings with uniform arcades [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED!. These designs carried the premise that the "style of the conqueror" would carve the image of France onto the Algerian show and, with its aesthetic and scalar difference (which formed a dramatic contrast to the urban and architectural forms of precolonial Algiers), establish a visual order that symbolized colonial power relation.(5)

Historians have commonly neared the French interventions in al-Jaza'ir (as the city is called in Arabic) solely as examples of military and practical planning that imprinted the French victory onto the city's form and image.(6) Critics of colonial urbanism, too, have emphasized the military prowess behind the interventions, while pointing, albeit true briefly, to the "protests of indigenous populations,"(7) or blaming the schemes for their "expression of an imperialist colonization, [with its! disregard and ignorance of the subservient culture"(8) The not many scholars who have discussed the scale and contented of the demolition undertaken in Algiers during the early years of the occupation have approached the topic again from the French side single alluding to the insensitivity of the colonizer to the tillage of the colonized.(9) The cumulative discourse has thus reduc Algerians to an ultimate status of inertia, plane when it took a critical direct the eye at colonial policies.