Tag: Napoleon in Egypt

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The movement to “decolonize the curriculum” has become something of an orthodoxy in Western universities. Its proponents argue that the academy has been shaped by Eurocentric assumptions, and that non-Western knowledge traditions deserve greater prominence. Yet the movement’s loudest advocates display a curious blind spot: they appear wholly impervious to the remarkable, and largely unthanked, role that Western scholars played in recovering, preserving, and transmitting much of the very non-Western knowledge they now wish to celebrate. (more…)

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Part 2 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 3 here)

II. Deserts Create Monsters and Messiahs

“The Bedouin could not look for God within him: he was too sure that he was within God. He could not conceive anything which was or was not God, Who alone was great . . . He was the most familiar of their words.” — Thomas Edward [T. E.] Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (more…)

Chile’s Atacama Desert: one of the driest places on Earth.

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Part 1 of 3 (Part 2 here)

Deserts are the strangest places on Earth.

I spent my undergraduate years at an isolated college town that sat on the fringes of a vast, interior desert. To the northwest, the great Rocky Mountains began their ascent; directly west lay No Man’s Land, but the Sun’s; to the south, the flats gradually lifted into ancient atolls, red gorges, and rock. As a native woodland creature, this dryland seemed to me like another planet. (more…)

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The eclectic scholar Kathryn S. returned to join host Nick Jeelvy on the latest broadcast of The Writers’ Bloc for a discussion on Orientalism — what happens when Western man gazes eastwards — and it is now available for download and online listening. (more…)

Napoleon’s North African-attired Consular Guard: a hard look to pull off

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Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

2. Rage Militaire: Franco-American Zouave-mania

“His parents taught him to be a cavalier, but the life of the Zou-zou he much did prefer.” — anonymous Confederate verse

“The city,” one Richmond, Virginia newspaperman enthused, “was yesterday thrown into a paroxysm of excitement by the arrival of the New Orleans Zouaves — a battalion of six hundred and thirty, as unique and picturesque looking Frenchmen as ever delighted the oculars of Napoleon the three.” (more…)