Trajecta Annual Congress ‘Reversing the Gaze’

Reversing the Gaze

 Dutch and Belgian Orientalists and the non-Western religious “Other” 

 Trajecta Annual Congress, 30 August 2023

 In the second half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century new technologies, such as steam, telegraph, print, press and radio, quickened not only the production and distribution of commodities, but also helped disseminate knowledge and human interaction at a faster pace. Against this background cross-bordering between the West and East and western knowledge about the Orient started to increase. Thus, orientalism was now not simply the product of European scholars, but became a joint enterprise that engaged Muslim, Christian, and Jewish scholars, from Western and Eastern Europe and the broader East: from North Africa through the Levant, Iran, India, Russia, and China.

 For the 2023 annual conference of Trajecta we want to go beyond the Saidian oppositional framework between European orientalists and the Orient by specifically looking at the different ways Dutch and Belgian orientalists, historians, anthropologists, archeologists, linguists, historians, theologians, missionaries met, experienced, valued and reported on other religions, their traditions and cultural practices with a special reference to their transnational interactions and encounters with indigenous scholars, intellectuals and lay-peoples. The stress of the conference theme is on interaction and the awareness of networks of intellectual exchange between the Netherlands and Belgium on the one hand, and the ‘Orient’ in the wider sense.

 For the program: click here.

Attendance is free, lunch and reception included. Please register below. The mandatory fields are marked with a star.

Organizing committee

George Harinck (TU Utrecht) and Umar Ryad (KU Leuven)