Rescuing History from Orientalism: The Non-West As an Analytical Framework

Rescuing the Orient from Orientalism: The Non-West as an Analytical Framework
Japan and Egypt lie off the two opposite ends of the Asian landmass.  In the nineteenth century, and until the second half of the twentieth century, there was little if any contact between them. Yet, by the nineteenth century, the asymmetry of power between Europe and the “Orient” was very real.  Just as Napoleon had swept the Mamluk rulers of Egypt in 1798, Commodore Perry broke open Japan in 1853. With such acts, which highlighted the fundamental asymmetry between an expanding West and two societies on the receiving end of Western expansion, the non-Western world was born.
This presentation compares the cultural trajectory of two non-Western societies, Japan and Egypt, by means of drawing education.  In the nineteenth century drawing education was not an art but a science.  It taught children to draw geometric shapes as a preparation for map making, industrial design, and scientific imaging.  This was a paradigm of geometric representation.  It was soon replaced, however, by a scientific paradigm, which sought not a geometric but a realistic representation of the world.  Yet from 1918 in Japan and 1947 in Egypt drawing became an art.
Why did two societies on the opposite ends of Asia initiate similar transformations in drawing education, and why were these transformations some three decades earlier in Japan?  This presentation argues that the most useful framework for understanding the cultural trajectories of Egyptian and Japanese modernity is not their position in East Asia or the Middle East, nor their identity as Islamic, Confucian, or secular societies.  Instead, their experience needs to be understood comparatively, as participating in singular yet parallel processes of adaptation to Western modernity.