Review Essays
Orientalism Twenty Years On

Periodically, we have been asking three different scholars to respond to a book that raises issues of interest to a broad range of historians. This is the first time that we have done this with a work that was published some time ago, and we have asked reviewers to pay as much attention to the impact that the study has had on historical practice as they pay to the intrinsic value of it as a piece of scholarship. Edward W. Said's provocative and controversial book Orientalism was a natural candidate for this kind of consideration, and we took the twentieth anniversary of its publication in the late 1970s as an occasion to invite three historians with very different areas of expertise to reflect on its influence—or lack thereof—within their fields. Andrew J. Rotter frames his comments on "Orientalism" and diplomatic history around an ironic development: Said is still only rarely cited by historians of American foreign relations, and yet a concern with the issues highlighted by that critic is now widespread. K. E. Fleming, by contrast, argues that, in studies of southeastern Europe, engagement with Said's ideas has become routine, and the question now is how exactly "Balkanism" and "Orientalism" resemble and differ from one another. Medievalist Kathleen Biddick, finally, explores the possibilities for applying Said's view of spatial difference to temporal distance. Each of the contributors also conveys a great deal in his or her writing about the strengths and weaknesses of a book that is now so much a part of so many interdisciplinary landscapes that its arguments—while open to many different sorts of criticisms and calls for modification—are difficult (and perhaps costly) for any historian to ignore.

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