Frontier Orientalism and the stereotype formation process in Georgian literature

Year, pages: 2018, 88 - 99

Georgian identity and social consciousness have been formed in the context of political and cultural resistance to the Muslim world. Taking into account this difficult historical experience, the goal of the present paper is to analyze to what extent the characters of the Oriental Muslim community are reflected by the Georgian literary texts. It discusses whether their perception in literary texts is constrained by the frontier Orientalist stereotypes and the comparison between the perceptions of the Russian colonizer and the Eastern Muslim colonizer is given. The paper discusses these issues based on Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism and Andre Gingrich’s concept of frontier Orientalism. It shows that in Georgian literature, the relationship with the Muslim space is determined by the existential fear that has emerged as a result of historical experience. However, in the modern and contemporary period, there is an evidence that such a frontier-Orientalist feeling towards the Muslim community is gradually weakening, but it is strengthening towards the Russian space.

Jamagidze, M. 2018. Frontier Orientalism and the stereotype formation process in Georgian literature. In World Literature Studies, vol. 10, no.1, pp. 88-99. 1337-9275.

Jamagidze, M. (2018). Frontier Orientalism and the stereotype formation process in Georgian literature. World Literature Studies, 10(1), 88-99. 1337-9275.

Publisher: ÚSvL SAV, v. v. i.