Setting Down the Sacred Past: African-American Race Histories. By Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010. 341 pp. $29.95 cloth

摘要

haunted the public, well beyond the academic scene, around the turn of thentwentieth century. In the last three chapters of Marchand’s book, the question ofnthe relation between Orientalist knowledge and the actuality of a German empirenin the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is addressed. Marchandnstresses here the continued—even in the light of a rising demand of Orientalistnexpertise (which meant for those who listened to this Siren’s call a departurenfrom traditional German scholarly ideals) to aid in the governance of conquerednlands—complex and contradictory views of the merits and defects of orientalncivilizations.