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An Introduction to the TRAFO series “40 Years After Orientalism”, Edited by Schirin Amir-Moazami (Freie Universität Berlin).

Published in 1978, Orientalism has been a seminal investigation on questions regarding cultural representation and hegemony, knowledge production and scholarship as well as governing the colonial and post-colonial Order. Offering a critical genealogy of a specific configuration of power and knowledge, Orientalism has turned into a founding document of postcolonial scholarship and continues to significantly shape conversations within different disciplines. However, despite Orientalism’s rigorous excavation and critique of the process by which strategies of knowing the colonized world operated as strategies for dominating it, Orientalism remains tenacious and far from obsolete. In an MA seminar and public lecture series based at the Institute of Islamic Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, we therefore honored Orientalism’s 40th anniversary and its seminal legacy. We discussed and examined the persistence of Orientalism and asked what Said’s work and the conversations it has triggered teach us today. This ongoing blog series offers a selection of perspectives from some of the invited speakers.