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Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation, by Reina Lewis; pp. xiv + 267. London and New York: Routledge, 1995, $55.00, 14.99 paper.
There can be no doubt that in the two decades since its first publication in 1978, Edward Said's Orientalism has profoundly changed the w-riting of nineteenth-century history and the study of Victorian literature. Scholars working in the field of visual culture too have taken up Said's analysis of "the Orient as an integral part of European material civilization and culture" and of Orientalism as aa mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles" (2) to find architecture, exhibited paintings, and printed ephemera steeped in imperialism and promoting Orientalist stereotypes. Along the way, Said's propositions have been debated and reformulated, his grand narratives perceived as too totalising. Taking issue with Said's claims that the Orient was a male province and experience, and his reluctance to consider seriously women's writing, feminist scholars have mapped women's experience and involvement in imperialism and acknowledged the imperialism formative of, and worked into, women's cultural production. Building on and developing the work of Anita Lew% Billie Melman, Sara Mills, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Reina Lewis demonstrates that "women did play a part in the textual production that constituted Orientalism" and she rightly insists that "gender, as a differentiating term, was integral to the structure of [Orientalist] discourse and individual experience of it" (18). Gendering Orientalism is...