Blog #108: Everyday Orientalism with Katherine Blouin

Everyday Orientalism (EO) was born 9 years ago in Barcelona, during the International Congress of Papyrologists. At the time, Usama Ali Gad, Rachel Mairs and I had grown exasperated at the Orientalism and gatekeeping that prevailed in Antiquity fields. The Whiteness of our scholarly communities (and by Whiteness, I mean more than one’s skin color), their Eurocentrism, and their propensity, through excruciatingly long peer-review processes, top-down editorial politics, and academic insularity, to sift any truly out-of-the-box voices and uncomfortable conversations out, were not only detrimental to our ability to do justice to what ancient stories were about; they were self-sabotaging.

Surely, there was a way to do things differently, we thought one evening over dinner.

Surely, we could harness the privileges that came with our respective permanent positions and contribute to the change we wanted to see.

We decided to start by creating a blog. Our colleague Arietta Papaconstantinou, who we shared our idea with the next morning on the way to the venue, suggested a name: Everyday Orientalism. We liked it.

That night, up in my hotel room, I created a WordPress account.

Everyday Orientalism was born.

EO is an open-access, public-facing platform that explores how history and power shape the way human societies define themselves through the “Other”. We understand Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism as a paradigm that can be applied beyond the so-called ‘Orient’. EO centers collaborative, creative and accessible content about periods, places and topics from outside hegemonic and ‘Classical’ canon and features the work of students and junior scholars from traditionally underrepresented groups and countries. We have so far published 159 posts, including (guest) essays, virtual exhibitions, and pedagogical resources. We have also organized four Egypt-held workshops on “Orientalism, the Classics and Egypt” (the 4th one was cancelled due to covid) and we are currently preparing a joint workshop on documenting, preserving and teaching endangered urban heritage in Egypt, Sudan, and Palestine in collaboration with AUC and Peopling the Past. Our ongoing virtual #EOTalks series, which was created as a response to the pandemic and meant to foster accessible and out-of-the-box conversations, includes thirty events on topics pertaining to Classics, History, pedagogy, popular culture and activism.

To us, embedding ancient history in broader intellectual landscapes is a crucial endeavor. Accordingly, the collaborators and blogs/platforms we collaborate with identify with a vast array of disciplines. Collaborators include students, early career researchers, and colleagues from five continents. Most of them are from traditionally marginalized groups and live/come from outside the Euro-American hegemonic sphere. Everyday Orientalism has so far hosted over 200 guest authors, artists, and panelists (full list here) and collaborated with numerous other organizations, websites, platforms and academic units, who acted as co-sponsors of events and/or cross-posted posts. Our material is used in many classrooms, cited by scholars and engaged with by members of the general public.

A few years ago, Rachel said something that struck me. It was something along the lines of “ideally, we’d want to get to a point where Everyday Orientalism is not necessary anymore. Should that ever happen, then our job would be done”. Although I knew she was being rhetorical, I wondered: Could that really happen? Could we witness a world that has fully parted ways with Orientalism and, more generally, with colonial othering? If anyone had any hopes to manifest such a post-Orientalist reality in the short-term, the second Nakba that has engulfed Palestine – and reverberated throughout the world – since October 8, 2023, has proven that Orientalism remains alive and well. Judging from the tsunami of dehumanizing propaganda deployed against the Palestinian People in the Global North, it is abundantly clear that the fabric and lexicon of Orientalism has not changed at all since Edward Said published his seminal work in 1978. The silences of Antiquity associations and of most Antiquity scholars on the genocide, epistemicide, and ecocide in Palestine also poses the question of the imperial roots of disciplines like Classics, which was simplistically and erroneously marketed as dedicated to the study of the roots of an imagined “Western civilization” that continues to be conceptualized as being separate from a “barbarian Orient”.

EO has collaborated with and platformed those speaking against complicity and investment in Euro-American hegemony, the annihilation of Palestinian history and heritage, and the dishonest weaponization of ancient history to justify ethnic cleansing. Palestine’s rich ancient history exists. This history is complex, rich, layered, and extremely interesting. Yet, apart from specialists working in Palestine, it has historically been sidelined, obscured, or erased to the profit of “Biblical” studies. Accordingly, it continues to be absent from mainstream historical curricula about the “Classical” or “ancient Mediterranean”. Over the past year and half, EO has published a series of (guests) posts about the destruction of Gazan heritage (see notably here and here), Antiquity fields responses to the genocide in Gaza, and universities’ structural anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia (see here and here). We have also published #EOPalestine, a 20-post primer on ancient and medieval Palestinian history authored by an international team of experts. Last but not least, we have, in collaboration with our colleagues at the Critical Ancient World Collective, hosted two international webinars in Solidarity with Palestine (a third event is scheduled to take place later this year).