Kalamazoo Medieval Congress 2017: Theorizing Orientalism in the Middle Ages: A Roundtable
When Edward Said rooted orientalism’s “formal existence [in] the decision of the Church council of Vienna in 1312,” he invited medievalists to investigate their corpus in an effort to theorize the origin point of his new theoretical paradigm. Since this claim, scholars such as Sharon Kinoshita, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Geraldine Heng, Suzanne Conklin Akbari, and Kim Phillips, among many others, have questioned the role of orientalism in discourses of alterity, colonialism, imperialism, nationalism, and cross-cultural exchange in the Middle Ages.