When art creates the oriental woman

Do you know orientalism? This artistic current has constructed an image of the Orient that is very different from reality based on the vision of the Western artist.

At the beginning of the XIX^e century, an artistic movement took off through the various colonization campaigns in North Africa and the Middle East: Orientalism. This current constructs an image of the Orient that is very different from reality based on the vision of the Western artist. In particular, oriental women are a favorite subject for artists, a source of inspiration and fantasies. Both sensual and fragile, the oriental woman can also be dangerous, being the fruit of an uncivilized and violent culture.

These stereotypes, over the decades, have settled in the collective imagination and still persist in current representations. How was this definition of the Eastern woman imposed by Western art? And how has it been decisive in its contemporary popular representations? We met Alain Messaoudi, associate researcher at the Institute of African Worlds in the History of Orientalism and representations, and Mariem Guellouz, sociolinguist at the University of Paris and dancer, to answer these questions.

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Directed by: Sirine Ben Younes and Pierre Tousis.

Mariem Guellouz, Lecturer in language sciences, Paris City University and Alain Messaoudi, Lecturer in Contemporary History, University of Nantes

This article is republished from The Conversation under Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.