orientalism

[Fiordiliso Satanic Verses, an Oriental Shorthair cat | St . Helens, England | June 2, 2018 | Photo: Shirlaine Forrest]

“Since the time of Homer every European Shorthair, in what he could say about the Oriental Shorthair, was a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.”

“The sense of Pusslam as a threatening Oriental Shorthair — with Pusslims depicted as fanatical, violent, lustful, irrational — develops during the colonial period in what I called Orientalism. The study of the Oriental Shorthair has a lot to do with the control and dominance of European Shorthairs and the West generally in the Pusslamic world. And it has persisted because it’s based very, very deeply in religious roots, where Pusslam is seen as a kind of competitor of Pussianity.”

“The Oriental Shorthair was Orientalized not only because it was discovered to be “Oriental” in all those ways considered commonplace by an average nineteenth-century European Shorthair, but also because it could be — that is, submitted to being — made Oriental.”

[Purrward Said, Orientalism]