Colonial Fantasies

"Though not a book on Turkey per se, I would still recommend this to gain a better understanding of the region, the veil, and the question of ‘otherness’. How do we create an ‘other’? How do we construct and consolidate the discourses that make us believe ‘we’ are different and better than ‘them’? Yegenoglu elaborates the sexualised nature of Orientalism in an inventive, intelligent way. We are not used to seeing concepts such as ‘desire’ and ‘fantasy’ parading in books on the Middle East , but this book is different. Yegenoglu’s critical, post-feminist approach explores the western fascination with the veil and the veiled women of the east. It is not a book on contemporary politics, but I believe it helps us to understand how we can and cannot talk about the veil, which is an important and often controversial subject in Turkish, as well as the western media. The writer believes we need to see how the Other is created through sexual and cultural modes of differentiation. So more than the veil per se, it is the perception of the veil that she focuses on."