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“Why,” Francisca Isidro wonders, “did we have to leave our families and move so far away, only to come back as cooks, waitresses, sales assistants, and the like?” And she recalls: “We came back from our time in East Germany with professions that were not held in particu-larly high regard in Mozambique. Nobody understood why we didn’t return as engineers, doctors and teachers. ‘A waitress?,’ they would wonder. ‘Why, they could have become a waitress in Mozambique. Nobody needs to spend so many years in school for that.’”2And with that, Ms. Isidro puts her fi nger right on a misapprehension at the heart of an ambitious state-led education migration program that saw 900 Mozambican children attend the School of Friendship (Schule der Freundschaft , SdF) in Staßfurt in the district of Magdeburg, in what today is Saxony-Anhalt, in the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany) from 1982 to 1988.3 Ms. Isidro returned to Mozambique as a trained salesperson for clothing, a profession she neither chose nor ever worked in again subsequently. Like her, these 900 children had to navigate the diverging values that particular environments bestowed upon knowledge. What they learned was interpreted diff erently in their home communities, at the SdF, and in their German host families
Why is Cleopatra, a descendent of Alexander the Great, a Ptolemy from a Greek–Macedonian family, in popular imagination an Oriental woman? True, she assumed some aspects of pharaonic imagery in order to rule Egypt, but her Orientalism mostly derives from ancient (Roman) and modern stereotypes: both the Orient and the idea of a woman in power are signs, in the Western tradition, of ‘otherness’ – and in this sense they can easily overlap and interchange.
This volume investigates how ancient women, and particularly powerful women, such as queens and empresses, have been re-imagined in Western (and not only Western) arts; highlights how this re-imagination and re-visualization is, more often than not, the product of Orientalist stereotypes – even when dealing with women who had nothing to do with Eastern regions; and compares these images with examples of Eastern gaze on the same women. Through the chapters in this volume, readers will discover the similarities and differences in the ways in which women in power were and still are described and decried by their opponents.