Hidden Heritage: Rediscovering Britain’s Lost Love of the Orient, Fatima Manji
Hidden Heritage attempts to bring some hidden gems to life, along with their history and context. It’s not just a game of spotting bits of ‘Oriental’ architecture and influence in Britain, but digging into what they meant at the time and what they might mean now. Much of it was new to me — not necessarily surprising, because I knew these influences existed, but new to me in the specifics, in someone actually bothering to point them out.
Fatima Manji’s writing is clear and easy to read in and of itself, but I especially enjoyed getting to read some bits of history that we’re usually less aware of.
Note: the book uses the term “Oriental”, even though it conflates a whole bunch of different cultures, because that’s how it was perceived at the time, and those cultures were conflated and viewed as one (or at least, as very, very closely related), and thus must be understood in that context.
