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By focusing on a wide range of eastern writers who created influential bodies of work on western mores and religious and political institutions, and who, in so doing, reflected deeply on their own habits and assumptions, Historic Engagements with Occidental Cultures, Religions, Powers calls into question the all-too-common assumption that until the emergence of postcolonial thought the role of easterners has been to serve as objects of the gaze of westerners. This group of international authors amply demonstrates that the insights of postcolonial studies into human relations can be relevant in contexts at a remove spatially and temporally from western colonialism. The collection is unusual in the scope of its scholarship: chapters present compelling narratives that address life in Europe, in the United States, and in post-World War II Japan through the eyes of eastern intellectuals of the tenth through the twentieth centuries.The collection contributes to postcolonial scholarship on Hybrid identities while adding to the body of scholarship countering assumptions that the Oriental was acted upon but did not act, spoken about but did not reply.
