Impact - The Aff’s orientalist imagery is crucial to perpetuating the violent division between the Orient and the West.

"In contemporary writing about nineteenth-century photography of the Middle East," writes Michelle L. Woodward, "it has become al- most a cliché to describe many oftheseimages as 'Orientalist'—that is, reflecting or propagating a system of representation that creates an essentialized difference between the 'Orient' and the 'West'"(363). This claim aptly captures the predominant anti-Saidian sentiment among art historians and curators who work on representations of the Middle East created by both European and indigenous painters and photographers. To be sure, responses to Said's discussion of Oriental- ism as a discourse of colonial power span the critical spectrum, from more rigorous and subtle critiques articulated from the left to the sometimes facile and reactionary from those of an opposing political orientation. On one side are art historians such as Zeynep Çelik, Jill Beaulieu and Mary Roberts, and Woodward who argue that "the trend to extend Said's analysis to apply equally to visual representations has . . . been used too broadly, obscuring nuances and inconsistencies, not only between different photographers' bodies of work but also within them" (Woodward 363). These scholars typically aim to con- structively revise Orientalism to encompass "a disparate and disputed set of discursive constructions" while at the same time acknowledging "Orientals" as "participants in the production of counternarratives or resistant images" (Bealieu and Roberts 3). On the other side are writ- ers, such as John MacKenzie and Ken Jacobson, who betray a marked suspicion of theory and seek to return the term "Orientalism" to its prior usage as an art historical term that could be deployed without suggestion of a broader political or ideological critique. In Orientalism: History, Theory, and the Arts, MacKenzie argues against Linda Nochlin that "there is little evidence of a necessary coherence between the imposition of direct imperial rule and the visual arts," claiming that "Orientalism celebrates cultural proximity, historical parallelism and religious familiarity [with the Middle East and North Africa] rather than true 'Otherness'" (51). Given such perceived "misconceptions inherent in postcolonialist analysis," Jacobson similarly suggests that "a return to more traditional methods is desirable for the study of 19th- and early 20th-century photography in North Africa and the Near East," urging commentators to focus more single-mindedly on the "notable aesthetic, as well as documentary and historical merit" when analyzing visual representations (88). In what follows, I argue that Orientalism should not be under- stood merely as an ideological discourse of power nor as a neutral art historical term, but rather as a network of aesthetic, economic, and political relationships that cross national and historical boundaries. Understood in this way, Orientalism is indispensible to understanding nineteenth-century photography of the Middle East. Whether consid- ered in the context of their production and dissemination in the nine- teenth century or in relation to their current afterlives as collectable objects or archives, photographs of the Orient become meaningful and legible only if they are considered in terms of the specific geopolitical distinctions, economic interests, and cultural assumptions about the Middle East and its people. While insisting that Orientalism offers a crucial perspective from which to comprehend the meaning and significance of photographic representations of the Middle East, I do not mean to suggest that such images should be understood merely as a reflection of Europeans' racial prejudice against "Orientals," or that these images simply validate European imperial dominance over the region. Nor would I wish to argue that Orientalist photography entails a binary visual structure between the Europeans as active agents and "Orientals" as passive objects of representation. Rather, I hope to provide an alternative view of Orientalistphotography that focuses on nodes and ties that bind artists, collectors, and museums across historical and national boundaries, which are productive of a distinctly exotic vision of the region, a vision at once embraced and perpetuated by the elite in the Middle East .Indigenous photography in and of itself, I maintain, does not constitute an oppositional locus or resistant iconography, for it too belongs to the Orientalist network that mediates its vocabulary and thematics of representation.1 A network theory of Orientalism concerns itself neither with the motivations of individual artists nor with the attributes of art objects, but instead studies the symmetric and asymmetric relations between discrete objects, specific individuals, and concrete practices.