Intimate Outsiders

Reviews / Votes

"This is an outstanding example of a truly interdisciplinary study, integrating painting, photography, travel narrative, and especially harem portraiture. Mary Roberts describes encounters between women-both British travelers and the women of Istanbul and Cairo harems-in a refreshing, innovative analysis of the historical and imaginary workings of harem imagery as forms of cross-cultural exchanges and interactions."-Julie F. Codell, editor of Imperial Co-Histories: National Identities and the British and Colonial Press "Transforming debates about Orientalism, gender, and cultural and political agency, Mary Roberts writes with beguiling simplicity about complicated subjects, taking her readers through a potentially bewildering maze of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural material with a voice both authoritative and accessible."-Reina Lewis, author of Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel, and the Ottoman Harem "Roberts hits all the important marks, and hits them well: political agency; gender roles; the ways in which the harem both fostered and smothered particular types of female power; the ways in which the encounter between westerner and oriental provided the latter an occasion to orchestrate what it was that was on display. All in and of themselves important-and complicated-questions, ones that too often have been treated superficially or unimaginatively. Here we get them all, with care and subtlety-and in a package that makes for surprisingly enjoyable reading." - K. E. Fleming (Journal of Colonialism & Colonial History) "The intimacy Roberts describes in this excellent book is exciting because it provides an alternative to the distancing and empowering notion of orientalism advocated by Said. . . . The stories told in Intimate Outsiders form a significant contribution to the history of painting in nineteenth-century Istanbul, and to the history of international networks among women of privileged social classes. What else they might mean will depend on what, if anything, is able to succeed 'orientalism' as a tool for the political analysis of global culture." - Nicholas Tromans (Art History)