Accidental Orientalists : modern Italian travelers in Ottoman lands / Barbara Spackman.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Spackman, Barbara, 1952- author.

Series:

Transnational Italian cultures ; 2.

Transnational Italian cultures ; 2

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Italians--Middle East--History--19th century.

Italians.

Italians--Middle East--History--20th century.

Civilization.

History.

Middle East--Civilization--19th century.

Middle East.

Middle East--Civilization--20th century.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

viii, 244 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Liverpool : Liverpool University Press, 2017.

Summary:

This book identifies a strand of what it calls "Accidental Orientalism" in narratives by Italians who found themselves in Ottoman Egypt and Anatolia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through historical accident and who wrote about their experiences in Italian, English, and French. Among them are young woman, Amalia Nizzoli, who learned Arabic, conversed the inhabitants of an Ottoman-Egyptian harem, and wrote a memoir in Italian; a young man, Giovanni Finati, who converted to Islam, passed as Albanian in Muhammad Ali's Egypt, and published his memoir in English; a strongman turned antiquarian, Giovanni Belzoni, whose narrative account in English documents the looting of antiquities by Europeans in Egypt; a princess and patriot, Cristina Trivulzio di Belgiojoso, who lived in exile in Anatolia and wrote in French condemning the Ottoman harem and proposing social reforms in in the Ottoman empire; and an early twentieth century anarchist and anti-colonialist, Leda Rafanelli, who converted to Islam, wrote prolifically, and posed before the camera in an Orient of her own fashioning.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [224]-239) and index.

ISBN:

9781786940209

1786940205

OCLC:

1001955515