Romanticism contributes to the Western imaginaire surrounding Islam, even today. Fantasies about maidens and monsters influenced the ways in which Orientalism constructed Jewish and Muslim men and women. Polynesian men were sexually objectified, at times as much as their female counterparts, and the same was true for Muslims. In the genre of Romantic Orientalism, we find descriptions of the East as a "terrain of bitumen pools, river-bores, whirlpools and rainbows in moving waters."

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's Orientalism and the broader literature on how colonial-era tropes persist in contemporary representation of Muslim and Polynesian subjects.

Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imag…, loc. 373