Orientalism in the Study of Oriental Philosophies (19th – First Half of the 20th Century)

The collective monograph “Orientalist Paradigm” in the Study of Oriental Philosophies (19th – first half of the 20th century) published by the Naukova Dumka Publishing House in 2023 is the subject of the review. In independent Ukraine, the demand for the study of “Orientalism” in the classical sense proposed by E. Said was expected to be linked to postcolonial studies on its own, Ukrainian, material. Western colonial prejudices against the “Other” in the East were reproduced in relation to Ukraine; however, the viewer was not in the West but primarily in Russia and Poland. The neighbors romanticized and eroticized Ukraine, giving it and its inhabitants the features of “femininity”, “emotionality”, “exoticism” and “eroticism”. Thus, the peculiarity of Ukrainian studies of Orientalism is its justified “Ukraine-centricity” and postcoloniality, when the subject of research is the Orientalism of Ukrainians or Orientalism towards Ukrainians. Another feature is that literary studies are a pioneer in such research. Against this background, the collective monograph on Orientalism in the study of Oriental philosophies in the West looks innovative and significantly enriching another niche in Ukrainian science – the study of the West-East interaction in non-Ukrainian space. Another feature of the monograph is that it does not emphasize the postcolonial aspect of Orientalism, but reveals various facets of intellectual and philosophical interaction between East and West, contributing to the mosaic of Ukrainian Orientalism studies. The collective monograph deals with Orientalism in the study of the philosophies of four civilisations – Muslim (with Sufism), Chinese, Indian and Jewish.