8 - Displacing Orientalism: Ottoman Jihad, German Imperialism, and the Armenian Genocide

Summary

THIS CHAPTER EXAMINES VARIOUS DISCOURSES involved in German-Turkish relations from the 1890s until the end of the First World War, arguing that they are evidence of a more multidirectional Orientalism than is suggested by Edward Said's idea of a hegemonic West representing and therefore controlling an essentialized East. Orientalism, these discourses reveal, does not occur along the single trajectory suggested by its name. It is not simply a nonreversible, monodirectional phenomenon radiating out from the West onto a passive Eastern object, but rather, as Sheldon Pollock among others has argued, something that can also emanate from the East, be applied by the East to itself, and even be applied by the West to the West. In short, the dialectics of Orientalism are infinitely more conflicted, complex, decentered, and displaced than Said's approach indicates.

The image of the “sick old man of Europe” as a passive Eastern pawn in Western imperialist power games is a case in point, failing to do justice to the extent to which the Ottoman Empire was an active participant in the major power plays of the period, all the while serving its own political agendas, which included a hegemonic national project based on ideas of “ethnic-national homogeneity,” or, as John Morrow puts it, “historians have long credited the German government with manipulating the Ottoman government into the war to foster German aims of an empire from Berlin to Baghdad.…More recently [however, they] have recognized that the … Young Turks had their own aims, and … manipulated the Germans.”