Tracing the Mirage of the Near East: Saracens, Barbarians, Turks, Moors and Arabs
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2019-05-12

The proposed paper traces the formulation of mythical ideological conceptions of Near-Easterners (inhabitants of the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa) beginning from their early becoming at the time of the crusades, through their resurrections in early modern England and up to their continued use today. I visit each of the imagined figures of the Near-Easterner within European and specifically English imagination: the ‘Saracen’, the ‘Moor’ whether of Barbary and Morocco or of Muslim Spain, as well as the ‘Turk’ of the Ottoman Empire and end with the new and contemporary mythical figure, the ‘Arab’. Drawing on Frederick Saussure’s and Jacques Derrida’s definitions and redefinitions of the ‘signifier’ and the ‘signified’, I demonstrate how the inhabitants of the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa, were defined from the first crusade, within an imagined framework of a specific stereotype. I conclude the paper by briefly shedding light on contemporary voices of resistance to the named signifiers within the context of decolonisation. 

Haythem Bastawi (Leeds Trinity University)