t is alreadypossible to suggest that Persian art was created from heterogeneous quotations taken out of context, fromelements of religious imagery from various ancient eastern civilisations reinterpreted and adapted by localartists to illustrate their myths or (subsequently?) to depict their deities

the prestigiousworks of art reflecting concepts of an ideological, official, dynastic or other such nature, and handicraftsor, more accurately, traded objects in which one can see more clearly changes in the aesthetic taste ofa wide range of buyers, the influence of local traditions and developments and innovations in particulartechniques.

On the other hand, a vast number of objects survive from the Middle Ages, yet here the constructionof outlines is far too complex. At every point along the way, the researcher is confused by the attemptto take into account all the twists and turns of development inherent in the material itself, and in acomparison of written sources with information contained in any inscription there might be on the object.There is thus a real danger of drowning in a sea of facts, albeit incontrovertibly established facts, withouthaving clarified the general trends.Persian Art: From Antiquity to the 19th CenturyInterior of Blue Mosque.

This debate, of which I presenta summary in the first part of this chapter, has been so far inconclusive, andopinions as to the language and ethnicity of the Hsiung-nu remain divided

question. Rather, it is necessary to recognize that involved here are two different ways of classifying colonized societies: the first focused on the essence of India, the second on universalistic and comparative taxonomies. It was precisely the intersection of the two that defined and gave force to colonial categ

2). It was an article of faith amongst many nineteenth-century colonial officials that there had been an Aryan invasion into India from Central Asia in the remote past, and many British ethnographers even ranked castes by reference to the degree of Aryan or Dravidia

The grave is a productive starting pointbecause it is a particularly dense semiotic object, a compound of place,text, person, and name.

E assim eles partilharam, de maneiras que vamos em breve investigar.O que eles partilharam, entretanto, não era apenas terra, lucro ougoverno; era a espécie de poder intelectual que tenho chamado deOrientalismo

história, a sua conança em homens como ele, e as suas expectativas.Ainda assim, ele fala pelos orientais no sentido de que aquilo que elespoderiam ter a dizer, se lhes fosse perguntado e pudessem responder,conrmaria um tanto inutilmente o que já é evidente: que eles são umaraça subjugada, dominada por uma raça que os conhece e sabe o que ébom para eles mais e melhor do que poderiam possivelmente saber elespróprios. Os seus grandes momentos estavam no passado; são úteis nomundo moderno apenas porque os novos impérios poderososefetivamente os tiraram da desgraça de seu declínio e transformaram-nos em residentes de colônias produtivas

I used to think my father was right, but now I see things differently: Ithink it was a case of reaping what one sows. I had originally been bent onbamboozling my father, but in the end I simply bamboozled myself onto theoperating table and under the knife.

The rapid rise in popularity of the word “bamboozle,” like that of“copycat,” demonstrates to me a breakdown of social morality and aconfusion in the value system in China today; it is an aftereffect of ouruneven development these past thirty years.

I wouldn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

dvertising is now so ubiquitousand ostentatious that the big-character posters of the Cultural Revolutionyears seem tame by comparison

The Rich List—or the Pigs-for-Slaughter List, if you prefer—is just thetip of the iceberg in China today

Today’s City Administration officials show little signs of progress in theirways of dealing with petty tradesmen, confiscating property as freely as wevigilantes did in the 1970s

It is with a heavy heart and a feeling of shame that I recall this episodenow. I have no idea whether this decent young man went on to marry as hehad planned, or how he managed to pay back those nine pounds’ worth ofcoupons he had borrowed. What I remember most vividly is how, when wewere beating him on the head, he controlled his rage and never fought back,just pushed us away with the palm of his hand

When we think back to what was best about ourchildhoods, we tend to reminisce about remarkably similar things, allinvolving the eating of some kind of treat; apart from that, we have veryfew memories to cherish

e seemed to have nothingthen, though we did have a blue sky.

This erstwhile totem of revolution died during my final year in primaryschool

My classmate’s older brother was for a time the symbol of revolution inmy eyes, because he loved to tell stories about his experiences as a RedGuard traveling the country

Such acts of intimidation are common among some Chineseentrepreneurs, who not only rely on beatings to seize control but will evenhire people to kill their rivals, putting the mafiosi in Hollywood moviescompletely in the shade

Let’s now consider how the revolutionary violence of the CulturalRevolution has continued to rear its head in the course of China’s economicsuccess story of the past thirty years.

I found Hua Xu’s response disappointing, for I wanted to be vindicatedby truth, not by brute force

This went on until one night when I had a very protracted dream. Unlikethe other nightmares, from which I always awoke before the moment ofdeath, in this one I experienced my own annihilation

Why is it that yourearly short stories are so full of blood and violence,” he asked, “when thistendency is not so evident in your later work?

To put it another way,writing enables me to claim ownership of two lives, one imaginary and onereal, and the relationship between them is like that between sickness andhealth: when one is strong, the other is bound to fall into decline. So, as myreal life becomes more routine, my imaginary life is all the more brimmingwith incident

It was my good fortune to find myself in this wonderful period whensupply and demand were so out of synch

The conversation turned to my first career, as a dentist, and my secondcareer, as a writer

The small-town big shot’s complacency continued for a few more daysbefore his career took a nosedive.

So things remained until one day, many years later, I happened upon aline in a poem by Heine: “Death is the cooling night.” That childhoodmemory, lost for so long, suddenly restored itself to my quivering heart,returning freshly washed, in limpid clarity, never again to leave me.

A few years ago I was involved in just such a book signing. An incessantdin drummed in my ears,

but now we see them popping up in streets and alleys in Englishas well

What I liked to read in Selected Works was simply the footnotes,explanatory summaries of historical events and biographical details abouthistorical figures, which proved to be much more interesting than the novelsin our local library. Although there was no emotion to be found in thefootnotes, they did have stories, and they did have characters

But how could an ignorant little boy like me appreciate Mao Zedong’sgrand vision?

In the thirty-odd years since Mao’s death China has fashioned anastonishing economic miracle, but the price it has paid is even moreastounding. When I left South Africa at the end of a visit during the 2010World Cup, the duty-free shop at Johannesburg’s airport was sellingvuvuzelas—Chinese-made plastic horns—for the equivalent of 100 yuaneach, but on my return home I learned that the export price was only 2.6yuan apiece. One company in Zhejiang manufactured 20 million vuvuzelasbut ended up making a profit of only about 100,000 yuan. This examplegives a sense of China’s lopsided development: year after year chemicalplants will dump industrial waste into our rivers, and although a single plantmight succeed in generating a thirty-million-yuan boost to China’s GDP, toclean up the rivers it has ruined will cost ten times that amount. Anauthority I respect has put it this way: China’s model of growth is to spend100 yuan to gain 10 yuan in increased GDP. Environmental degradation,moral collapse, the polarization of rich and poor, pervasive corruption—allthese things are constantly exacerbating the contradictions in Chinesesociety. More and more we hear of mass protests in which hundreds or even

When I was little, I thought it very unfortunate that I had the surname Yuand wished there had been a Mao on either my father’s or my mother’s sideof the family, not realizing that for ordinary folk like us Mao was a namethat projected authority but could be dangerous, too

I have a sense that in today’s China we no longer have aleader—all we have is a leadership

part of town one night in late May1989

wenty years later, it is adisturbing fact that among the younger generation in China today few knowanything about the Tiananmen Incident, and those who do say vaguely, “Alot of people in the streets then, that’s what I heard.

“people”

howeverimmature the students’ faces or naive their views

police-free city in perfect order

o positiondifferent products in the marketplace

replacing it with something new

he definition of “thepeople” could not have been simpler, namely “workers, peasants, soldiers,scholars, merchants”—“merchants

In October of that year,when I visited Peking University, I found myself in a different world, whereengagement with affairs of state was nowhere to be found

effects that seem so glorious and search for their causes, whateverdiscomfort that may entail

. Judaism, the quintessential “religion of the book” is usually thought of as a diasporaas well, one founded specifically on exile. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, theterm Diaspora was adopted into English in the late nineteenth century from the Greek ofDeuteronomy (28:25), referring to the dispersal of the Jews after the Captivity. Diaspora inthe sense of exile entered the English language in a moment of high nationalism and hasbeen associated with its sentiments ever since. As exile, diaspora has been thought of as anabnormal condition. Nevertheless, a number of recent works argue for thinking of dias-pora as a normal state of aªairs in a Jewish tradition shaped by vital interchanges with oth-ers over millennia

For diasporas, as for religions, absence can be highly productive

In a society of migrants, what is important is not where you were born,but where you die. This, if nothing else, makes a diaspora entirely diªer-ent from a nation, both in concept and in sentiment. Persons belong tonations by virtue of being born into them. Individuals claim entitlementissuing from place of birth. The nation itself takes its name from the actof giving birth, nasci

Leste como uma carreira)

Oriente é uma idéia que tem uma história e uma tradição depensamento, um imaginário e um vocabulário que lhe deram realidade epresença no e para o Ocidente.

is an Orientalist, and what he or she does is Orien-talism

in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having au-thority over the Orient.