Shaj Mathew

A century before Edward Said, a robust critique of orientalism proliferated within the so-called Orient. Zeynep Çelik argues this point in an edited collection of journalism, polemic, and scholarship from the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish Republic. Europe Knows Nothing about the Orient criticizes European knowledge production about Turkey through voices well known—such as Ahmed Midhat, Nâzım Hikmet, Halide Edib, and Tevfik Fikret—as well as those less so, including Şevket Süreyya and Ebüzziya. Translated into English from the original Turkish edition by Gregory Key, Nergis Perçinel, Micah Hughes, İlker Hepkaner, and Aron Aji, these modernist writers do not celebrate the arrival of European modernity so much as critique its transformation of nearly every facet of Turkish life: architecture, tourism, gender, and literature. This light paperback is therefore anything but: it is an essential companion to Orientalism (1978). While Said’s text has generated many memorable critiques, ranging from those of Aijaz Ahmad to Wael Hallaq, Çelik’s intervention gives voice to those who were “orientalized.” If orientalist scholarship constituted epistemic violence, this volume represents a trove of epistemic resistance.

He is a walking paradox: a loner who desires the crowd, “a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito,” a spectator who casts off his air of detachment, a skeptic who can experience states of childlike wonder, “an ‘I’ with an insatiable appetite for the ‘non-I.’” More gaze than body, he is a phantom of the arcade, “a mirror as vast as the crowd itself . . . a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness” (Baudelaire, “Painter,” 9). Who is this person? “Observer, philosopher . . . —call him what you will,” the flâneur is the modern man par excellence, an urban stroller who will always be encountered, en passant, in the act of capturing “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent”—that is, the contradictory, enigmatic, and elusive condition otherwise known as modernity (13). This origin story has long dominated critical discussions of flânerie, a term I take to signify a way of moving through urban space as well as a first-person narrative form that documents that movement. The flâneur’s vein of solitary, melancholic, and aimless walking—typically coeval with the modernization of a global city—has become synonymous with strolls through nineteenth-century Paris. Even recent efforts to chart the spread of flânerie into other global cities have rehearsed this particular story, looking to Parisian flânerie as the initial tradition that contemporary walkers rail against or continue in. The rhyme between Paris, flânerie, and modernity has endured for many reasons, but it generally attests to the success of Charles Baudelaire and his afterlife in the writings of Walter Benjamin. Rare is the treatment of streetwalking that does not acknowledge Baudelaire’s legendary typology of the flâneur in “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863). And if Baudelaire’s efforts were not enough, the association between the flâneur, France, and modernity was enshrined a century later, when Benjamin hailed Paris as “the promised land of the flâneur” in his unfinished yet exhaustive index of the city, The Arcades Project.