Footnote #79 - Orientalism

The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!

For Footnote #79, Chris and Alex engage the seminal work of Edward Said and his coining and development of Orientalism as a critical framework for mapping the acceptance of the presence of a distinction between East and West, and the terms under which such a geographical and, crucially, conceptual division has been understood. Topics include the emergence of an Orientalist rhetoric during the 1970s and its alignment with psychoanalysis; the West’s constructed image of the East as the manifestation of what Gerald Sim calls a “European unconscious” and its identity as a repressed, hidden, and mystical Other; the implications for an essentialist attitude towards the Middle East, Asia, North Africa powered by the decorative - rather than in-depth - view of Arab “customs” and traditions; the value of Orientalism to Film Studies and its histories of representation in defining the “foreign”; and the Orient as a “repository” for certain types of colonialist and post-colonialist fantasies.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**

**As featured on MillionPodcast’s Best 10 UK Animation Podcasts and Best 60 Movie Podcasts in the UK**

Suggested Readings

  • Kim, Joon Yang. 2013. “The East Asian Post-Human Prometheus: Animated Mechanical ‘Others’” In Pervasive Animation, ed. Suzanne Buchan, 172–194. New York: Routledge.

  • Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. London and New York: Penguin.

  • Sim, Gerald. 2014. The Subject of Film and Race: Retheorizing Politics, Ideology and Cinema. London: Bloomsbury.

  • Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam, 1994. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. London and New York: Routledge.

  • Semmerling, Tim. 2006. Evil Arabs in American Popular Film: Orientalist Fear. Austin: University of Texas Press.

  • Thomas, Ebony Elizabeth. 2019. The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to The Hunger Games. New York: NYU Press.

FOOTNOTE PODCASTChristopher Holliday and Alexander SergeantRACE, HISTORY, THEORY, COLONIALISM, REPRESENTATIONComment