World Literature After Orientalism: The Enduring Lure of the Occident Sabry Hafez In a conference on World Literature located in Istanbul in 2008, one of the panels to which I contributed was entitled “Literature after Orientalism.” 1 The title begs the question of what the organizers meant by “after.” Most certainly, the title does not mean that literature before Orientalism was different from literature after Orientalism. As the conference was debating world literature both as a concept and as a complex construct, the perception of lit- erature was not the main issue in the panel. Literature, thus, is a con- stant, and Orientalism is the changing factor in the title. But which Orientalism? Is it that of the famous book published by Edward Said in 1978 or the practice and the institution that he analyzed and deconstructed? Had it been the former, then the book would have been the turning point, and my input to the panel would have been a survey of literature in three decades following the publication of Orientalism. If it is the latter, then there are two different possibili- ties: (1) the book, a landmark no doubt, has dealt a devastating blow to Orientalism—the practice and the institution—and hence the question concerns literature in a world without Orientalism. (2) The other possibility is more nuanced; it acknowledges the role of Said’s seminal book in problematizing the field of study known as Orientalism, that encompasses literature, but where it has not been dismantled altogether and our world is not free of Orientalist world- views. This article addresses the traces of embedded Orientalism— in its manifest and latent forms—in world literature. Let us start by a working definition of Orientalism: Orientalism, or the dynamics of the “orientalisation of the orient” (Said, Orientalism 67), its representation, definition, and use, can be defined in Said’s words: A field like Orientalism has a cumulative and corporate iden- tity, one that is particularly strong given its association with traditional learning (the classics, the Bible, philology), public Alif 34 (2014) 1