Europe Knows Nothing about the Orient - A Critical Discourse (1872-1932)

A century before the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism, a passionate discourse emerged in the Ottoman Empire, rebutting politicized Western representations of the East. Until the 1930s, Ottoman and early Turkish Republican intellectuals, well acquainted with the European political and cultural scene and charged with their own ideological agendas, deconstructed tired clichés about “the Orient.” In this book, Zeynep Çelik recontextualizes Eurocentric postcolonial studies, unearthing an important episode in modern Middle Eastern intellectual history and curating a selection of primary texts illustrating the debates.

Zeynep Çelik is distinguished professor emerita at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Aron Aji is director of the University of Iowa’s MFA in Literary Translation program.

Gregory Key is a lecturer in modern and Ottoman Turkish at SUNY Binghamton in New York.