lawrence, piaf and the other

our international politics topic this week is colonialism. this reminds me of my english history courses at leipzig, and i'm glad there is an almost seamless transition to where i left off in 1996. we'll be looking at the englishmen's favourite colony of course, the palestine. on my trip to the holyland, all the english tourists i met saw themselves as little lawrences of arabia. *aqaba... from the land!*
then there is algeria. i had a french friend in belfast, frederic, whose parents to this day cannot stand to listen to piaf's *je ne regrette rien* because it was the song of the french expats as they were forcibly returned to france in the 1950s. but at soas, we discuss abstract theory, not personal experience.
back to said's orientalism. when we talk about the concept of the orient, of course we talk about the *other*, the *exotic* and, to us pale and bloodless eurocentrics, the *strange* and *mysterious*, and either the *heathen* or the *religious fanatic*, depending on which century you live in. 19th-century english literature is full of the sujet *morally upright english gentleman is seduced by exotic femme fatale in far-away, hot land, and either [a] prevails or [b] is destroyed*. i did the literary criticism, now i wonder what the political discourse will be like.