Proto-orientalism, the english early modern theatre of alterity, and the cultural logic of nascent capitalism

Abstract EN

This article situates in a revisionist context Anglo-Muslim encounters and their representations in Drama.

Drawing upon such methodologies as New Historicism and Postcolonialism, the present paper aims to yoke the incommensurable discursive and the material and to gauge the implications of Nascent Capitalism and the subsequent emergence of a market culture on the representation of Muslims.

It is argued that England's belated initiative in global trade fueled a strong tendency towards contradistinction.

The theatre, as a cultural institution and a rapidly expanding entertainment industry, was inextricably bound to the joint-stock companies that dominated foreign Eastern trade and contributed to diffusing and complicating those encounters further.

By drawing from the perpetual process of antagonism to Islam, and by responding to the mercantilism of theatricality, the theater was bound to an economical-religious necessity in engendering the cultural imperative of Proto-Orientalist Muslim representations.