Reina Lewis. Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem.(Book review)

Reina Lewis. Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2004. 297 pp. ISBN 0-8135-3543-3, $29.95.

In this book Reina Lewis focuses on a group of women writers whose travel accounts, memoirs, and fictions offer a non-Western engagement with the stereotypes of the Oriental woman. As Lewis reminds us at the outset, stereotypes change; they are challenged and yet they also possess a flexibility that continues to structure the terms of contemporary power and oppression. "Orientalism" gathers together a series of powerful stereotypes that are fundamental to the self-construction of the Western subject as an enlightened, modern, sovereign individual understood over and against its "Other," understood as the archaic, primitive, exotic Oriental. Lewis's concern, both here and in her earlier study of women's roles in imperial culture and discourse, Gendering Orientalism: Race Femininity and …