Planes, Trains and Car Bombs: Departures from the Adjectival Orient

It was precisely this “Orient” that the Palestinian-American literary scholar Edward Said cast in his book Orientalism (1978) as “adjectival.” For visitors it was a place of “sensuality, promise, terror, sublimity, idyllic pleasure, intense energy” — a seduction to which major European, and later American, powers would lay claim.¹ 1 - Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 88, 118 - 19. In Said’s view, the wildly descriptive imagined Orient passed on from authors such as Gustave Flaubert and T. E. Lawrence tells us much more about the appetites and privileges of these men than it does about the people they encountered during their travels.