Negotiating the ‘Holy Land’: Cross-Cultural Encounters from Bonaparte to Blake

Abstract

© 2020 The Institute of Postcolonial Studies. Napoleon's invasion of Egypt, launched in 1798, is closely linked to the birth of modern Orientalism, which Edward Said describes as the disciplines through which ‘the Orient was reconstructed' in forms that brought it ‘closer to Europe'. But it can also be linked to what Édouard Glissant calls ‘the restlessness of the same disturbed by the other'. This perturbation is the primary object of this essay, which I explore through works by Robert Ker Porter (1777–1842), a well-known artist, traveller and diplomat; Richard Brothers (1757–1824), a popular prophet, who exerted a powerful influence on Europe's millenarian circles in the 1790s; and William..