Russian Orientalism in a Global Context: Hybridity, Encounter, and Representation, 1740–1940

Reviewed by: Kamran Karimullah – University of Manchester, UK

Published by: Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023, 328pp. ISBN: 978-15266232.

This excellent collection of essays on Russian Orientalism by around a dozen art historians grew out of the 2019 conference panel entitled “Looking East: Russian Orientalism in a Global Context” (hereafter: ROGC) held at the 107th Annual Conference of the College Art Association. Using arts, painting, architecture and decorative art, produced over a two-hundred year period, the contributors discuss distinctive features of Russian Orientalism and compare them with the ‘classical’ expression of Western European Orientalism. In the afterword, Mary Roberts situates the volume within the diverse responses to Edward Said’s pioneering Orientalism (1978) in art history. While Said’s pioneering book was always about European discourses about the Middle East and Islam, more recently art historians have sought to incorporate ‘subaltern’ perspectives into the art history canon (pp.254–255).

The publication of ROGC represents an important step in art history’s coming to grips with the legacy of Said’s ideas. While most ROGC contributors engage with Said’s seminal work, their aim is not to criticise him for failing to take Russian Orientalism into account in his selective literary survey of the writings of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European, mainly British and French, orientalists. To the contrary, in one way or another each essay in the collection shows that Russia’s status as European was both highly unstable and hotly contested at the time.