Thirteenth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

Orientalism emerged during the eightieth century as a Western vision of the east. Edward Said states that orientalism produced a patronizing representation of the ‘other’ and it is inextricable from imperialism. One could state that orientalism is the aesthetic of colonialism. This dimension is compounded by two processes: a juxtaposition between us – the European – and a generic other; the integration of a reified fragment from ‘another culture’ within the artificially homogenized European culture. Juxtaposition and separation forged orientalism and the imperial imagination. The epic and legitimacy of this vision is found in technological developments like railways. This later reshaped the ideas of space and time and formed the colonial idea of the higher evolution of the European society as well as the logistic of the European imperial projects, with strong relevance for colonial trade. Technology and transport development offered also the opportunity to visit ‘wild’ colonial territories from the comfort of a train wagon. While literature, visual arts, propaganda and mass media, depicted the train as the ascendance of modernity within backward countries, it also shaped the properly colonial imagination. This paper explores the idea that the train forged colonial aesthetics, and deeply contributed to the foundation of colonialism. The detached vision it provided – a feeling of European comfort while traveling through the darkness of colonial territories – is more than a metaphor but less than an explanation for orientalism. Yet, it epitomizes orientalism while representing the logistics of its emersion and the rationality of colonial domination.