LAURA GANNON (个展)

Forty years ago, Edward Said’s Orientalism emerged as a cry in the critical wilderness, an elegant j’accuse skewering the essentialization of the East, from Aeschylus to Karl Marx. Syrupy romantics, military strategists, scholars and gonzo explorers trudged through Said’s thrilling history, all of them implicated in a vast network of interests invested in describing, taming and, finally, bringing into being the very notion of ‘the Orient’ as we know it. ‘The East is a career,’ read one of the book’s epigraphs – the words of the 19th-century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. – 四十年前，爱德华·赛义德的东方主义在批判的荒野中以一种优雅的控诉歪曲了东方的本质化，从埃斯库罗斯到卡尔·马克思。糖浆般的浪漫主义者、军事战略家、学者和刚俑探险家在赛义德令人激动的历史中跋涉，所有这些都牵涉到一个巨大的兴趣网络中，这个兴趣网络投资于描述、驯服，最后，形成了我们所知道的“东方”的概念。“东方是一个事业，”书中的一段铭文——19世纪英国首相本杰明·迪斯雷利（Benjamin Disraeli）的话中写道。