Introduction: The Dialectics of Early Modern Orientalism

The introduction reviews the reception of Said’s Orientalism in early modern studies and situates the volume within the critical discourse about Orientalism by early modernists across disciplines. The authors propose to re-engage with the Saidian concept of Orientalism and suggest that the Orientalism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries constitutes a distinct historical chapter, characterized by its rhetorical multiplicity and dialectic quality. Early modern Orientalism is best understood as an open, creative, and flexible discourse, as a style of thought rather than a system of knowledge. The authors then demonstrate how the chapters of this interdisciplinary collection relate to the proposed dialectics of early modern Orientalism and to each other, creating dialectic effects among themselves.