Crusading-as-entertainment is not new. The fictionalisation of the crusades, Susan Edgington remarks, began even before the capture of Jerusalem in 1099; the medieval Chanson de geste, tales of chivalry and even the chronicles themselves, all sought to entertain audiences while informing them, recording past events and inspiring their emulation. The crusades, then, have always been (in the broadest sense) fictive events – alongside military, political and theological ones. Increasingly, the technologies of entertainment production and consumption have commodified the crusades for a broad audience; beginning with troubadour songs and epic poems and expanding their reach through the production of books and pamphlets, all the way to the twentieth century’s invention of the cinema and the twenty-first-century explosion of digital culture. They have produced, as Jerome de Groot has termed the boom in historical culture more generally, ‘historiocopia’: an almost endless abundance of historical material in (especially Western) popular culture.

In recent years, scholars of International Relations and the Middle East have increasingly argued that the region’s enduring colonial legacies render postcolonial theory not merely relevant but essential. This chapter contends that the relationship also works in the opposite direction: the Middle East has been central to the emergence and evolution of postcolonial thought. It traces the disciplinary and historical foundations of postcolonialism, outlines its key claims and limitations, and concludes with an analysis of Syria as an illustrative case of postcolonial inquiry in the Middle Eastern context.

The King and I (1951) undoubtedly provokes controversy and debate. Its imperialist and racist resonances stem from its source materials, Margaret Landon’s Anna and the King of Siam (1944) and Anna Leonowens’s own writings, and were transferred to the musical itself. But just as Anna in the musical wants to conquer the attitudes of the historical King Mongkut, so do Rodgers and Hammerstein want to conquer the fundamental racial and geopolitical challenges of the story. They do this through their musical numbers, their ‘delivery system’, through which they bring forth the audience’s most profound emotional responses that centre on love. The ballet ‘The Small House of Uncle Thomas’, Tuptim’s re-envisioning of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin receives particular attention for its rhetoric about slavery and freedom as well as Jerome Robbins’s choreography. The chapter also explores the 2018 musical Soft Power (book and lyrics by David Henry Hwang, music by Jeanine Tesori) as a ‘reverse’ The King and I.

This chapter focuses on Puccini’s 1907 tour to New York, following the disastrous premiere of Madama Butterfly at La Scala and reflecting a longer engagement with US culture on the composer’s part. Puccini could embody a lineage of now vanished Italian composers for New York critics, and the New York visit followed a similar tour to Buenos Aires in 1905. But the emergence of gramophone opera recordings offered an alternative model of transatlantic encounter, as Italian operatic voices were increasingly mediated through American technology. Opera discs promised a specifically American form of operatic experience, I argue, one that was the source of considerable cultural and legal controversy between US companies and Italian composers. Madama Butterfly’s plot and opposing sound worlds can ultimately be heard as a meditation on broader Italian-American tensions, shaped by contemporary discourses around Italian vocality and American materialism. Madama Butterfly emerges at the centre of a changing auditory culture in the early twentieth century, in which Puccini’s musicalized Japan has suggestive echoes of Italy.

Heinrich’s journey with his mother and the merchants continues. Chapter 4 of Heinrich von Ofterdingen centers on their time spent at a mountain castle. Here Heinrich directly experiences the forces of poetry, first through the violent song of the knights and then through the unifying song of Zulima, a Muslim captive. Zulima opens Heinrich to a feeling of universal fellowship or philia. In conversation with her, his perspective on the crusades is enlightened, and he sees the missed opportunity of unity between the Christians and Muslims. On the morning of their departure, Zulima and Heinrich exchange gifts as an expression of their mutual gratitude.

The idea that Japan and Greece might be closely related is of European origin. Coinciding with the modern and demiurgical impulse that seized the Western imagination in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, it was part of a vast reconceptualization of the world in which analogy occupied a fundamental place. One of its first formulations is found in the History of Japan composed by the German physician Engelbert Kaempfer (1651–1716) and published eleven years after his death. Kaempfer stayed for two years in Nagasaki, working for the Dutch East India Company, and was one of the first Europeans to publish a detailed description of the archipelago following the expulsion of the Jesuits and most other Westerners in the first decades of the seventeenth century. His account is notable above all for unambiguously placing science before religion and personal analysis before collective evangelization.

This chapter traces an English Romantic poetics of heteromasculinist expression, a key example where heterosexual love dictates which works are worth reading globally as serious literature, to late eighteenth-century translators who “straightened” the famous Persian poet Shamsoddin Mohammad Hafiz Shirazi (ca. 1325–89) into a model of world literature. From Sir William Jones’s A Grammar of the Persian Language (1771) to Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát (1859), English translations that equate classical Persian poets with Anacreon (570–488 BC) – the Greek lyricist renowned for his bawdy drinking songs dedicated to beautiful male youths – transmitted to Romantic lyricism queer practices of imitative poetry-writing. Such contrasting social-literary relations counteract the heteronormativity universalized by colonial (mis)translators in homophilic collaboration with their Indo-Persian instructors. A salient example is the Lucknow-born Muslim nobleman Mirza Abu Talib Khan (1752–1806), whose Hafiz-style “Ode to London” shows how contentious were the (homo)erotic Romantic poetics of untranslatable genders for reading world literature straightly.

To consider Romanticism, world literature, and empire together entails reexamining the position of authors like Byron not only within the British Empire but also within other imperial formations, such as the Ottoman Empire. Focusing on Byron’s Ottoman Turkish reception, where he seems to exert no influence on local literary-cultural sensibilities, this chapter explores possibilities of envisioning a world literature that does not reproduce Western capitalist value systems. Byron’s “insignificant” presence in the Ottoman Turkish textual-visual landscape undermines the Eurocentric romanticization of the cultural capital attributed to Western icons among non-Anglophone audiences; simultaneously, it fuels a critical reflection on the empire-empire nexus that complicates the conventional geocultural hierarchies (e.g., East versus West, Orient versus Occident, etc.) shaping the contours of world literature.

The first decade of the nineteenth century was a time of British cultural reinvention, highlighted by the rise of Orientalism and comparative studies. Robert Southey emerged as a key figure during this period with his Orientalist poems that bookend the decade, Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) and The Curse of Kehama (1810). In this chapter, I analyze how Southey’s works reflect and advance Orientalist themes and forms, particularly through a deracinated Romantic subject. Southey creates this subject, free from cultural, religious, and political bounds, through an Orientalist licence for non-representation. This non-representation is seen in Southey’s flattening of time, space, characters, and objects. With the publication of Kehama by the end of the decade, I argue that Southey’s Orientalist licence intertwines with imperial logics of racial, ethnic, and religious othering. This othering reinforces a divide between British subjects and the Indian ‘other’, highlighting an individualism steeped in white Western dominance.

Critical thinking on the relationship between fashion and ideas of personhood tends to fall into two approaches: (1) the violation or diminishing of persons by fashion as an oppressive expression of gender expectations and base commercialism; (2) the celebration of fashion as an agential mode of performance and resignification. Both leave uncontested a set of mutually imbricated oppositions between persons versus nonpersons, interiority versus exteriority, essence versus surface, organic body versus synthetic dress. What happens to how we think about fashion and beauty when they take place on the denigrated, racialized, and gendered body? The woman of color presents a provocation about the toggle between personhood and objecthood. What if race is fashion (that is, stylized, transferable, synthetic), and what are the political implications of posing such a question?

This chapter focuses on race in Pater’s works, contextualising these within the racial politics of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western aesthetic discourse, especially in the work of two of Pater’s major intellectual influences, the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who profoundly shaped the cultural context of discussions of art and beauty in the West. It analyses how Pater’s writings on classical Greek sculptures and the ancient Greek god Apollo responded to this earlier cultural history, focusing on his early essay “Winckelmann” (1873) and his later short story “Apollo in Picardy” (1893). The final section examines “A Study of Dionysus” (1876) and “Denys l’Auxerrois” (1886), works where Pater portrays the wine-god, traditionally depicted as the embodiment of Oriental excess, violence, and irrationality, in a manner that affirms marginalised forms of knowledge and ways of perceiving the world associated with “Orientalised” racial groups.

When discussing Asian religion, art, and philosophy, Emerson generally bestows praise and tends toward cosmopolitan, universalist sentiments. Old Asian ideas, especially from Persian, Indian, and Chinese traditions, reinforced his Transcendentalist sense of morality and, especially, his belief in “the infinitude of the private man.” In the contexts of geography and history, however, he gravitates toward nationalist, imperialist, and racist views. Here he betrays his vulnerability to some of the ruling ideas of geographical determinism and teleological historicism informing the ideology of manifest destiny. Yet, true to form for a writer who so famously abjured consistency, this basic distinction does not always hold. This chapter thus begins with an examination of Emerson’s discrepant Asias before analyzing how, despite this general dichotomy, he was sometimes able to subvert prevailing tendencies and introduce uncommon subtleties to his representation of Asia, its cultures, and its peoples.

This chapter accounts for Emerson’s complex, and sometimes seemingly contradictory, relationship to religion and religious experience. While Emerson definitively left the Christian ministry in the early 1830s – turning his back on eight generations of his forefathers who had all become ministers – he never abandoned a profound interest in broader forms of spirituality, including those outside the pale of Christendom. If reason and faith were to be found “in the woods” (and not the church), as his inaugural debut Nature (1836) provocatively claimed, some critics have read Emerson as a secularist (or at the very least a naturalist), epitomizing larger dynamics of nineteenth-century dis- and re-enchantment. This chapter aims for a more nuanced (and multi-hued) view, arguing that Emerson believed the “spiritual laws” of the cosmos could be explained by the twinned activities of science and poetics as forms of social praxis, a communal making of beauty and truth.

This chapter traces the emergence of a North African critique of Arab nationalism and its project for the Arab Renaissance in the aftermath of the 1967 Arab defeat. It takes up the journeys of intellectuals Moroccan Abdallah Laroui and Tunisian Hichem Djaït and how they challenged the dominant frameworks of Arab nationalism and pan-Arab unity at the 1970 Louvain Conference on the Arab renaissance. The two critiqued both the ideological uses of history by the national project and the epistemological structures of Orientalist scholarship, which they accused of perpetuating a discourse of Arab cultural crisis and decadence. This chapter then traces their engagements with figures such as Gustav von Grunebaum, Louis Massignon, and Jacques Berque in the publishing landscape of Parisian orientalism. As such, these two examples illustrate a new position in Arab thought, which believed in the imperative of reclaiming historical thinking as a tool for intellectual decolonization. In charting these entanglements, this chapter sheds light on the continued ties between North Africa, the Arab East, and Parisian Orientalism, and the debate on cultural authenticity and Arab modernity.

Alongside the rise of Romanticism, which emerged as a reaction to the perceived excesses of modernism and industrialization that threatened humanity’s integrity, came the rise of Romantic Orientalism as an academic field, institutionalized in universities and scholarly associations in the nineteenth century. Romantic Orientalists sought to rediscover in the East the lost innocence of human minds, or the pure knowledge of God, obscured by industrial civilization. Romantic Sinologists revived many of the Jesuits’ idealized views of China, immersing themselves in Confucian texts and Chinese folk religious practices to seek the untainted, original human soul and God-inspired morality. Notable Sinologists such as James Legge and J. J. M. de Groot exemplified this tradition in the study of classic texts and ethnography, respectively. They argued that Chinese civilization had remained continuous and unchanged for thousands of years, and its divinely inspired morality was equal to or superior to that of Europe.

Political discourses on China have swung between naïve idealization and racist contempt over the past decade. This pendulum swing has roots in the oscillating extremes of positive and negative interpretations of China in Western scholarship over the last eight centuries. From the medieval church’s depiction of the Tartars, through early modern priests’ debates about Chinese religions, Enlightenment thinkers’ disputes over the nature of China’s political economy and moral systems, to the Romantic and scientific-racist Sinology of the nineteenth century, perceptions of China have alternated between seeing it as a civilization sharing Christian morality with Europe and as a satanic or idolatrous civilization threatening Christian values and freedom. These shifts have stemmed from both the internal dynamics of the academic field and evolving political and economic relations between Europe and China.