Orientalism
1978
- study and teaching
- east and west
- foreign public opinion, occidental
- imperialism
- foreign opinion, occidental
- orientalism
- history
- foreign public opinion
- civilization, oriental
- occidental foreign public opinion
The story
*Orientalism* is a 1978 book by Edward W. Said, in which the author discusses Orientalism, defined as the West's patronizing representations of "The East"—the societies and peoples who inhabit the places of Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East. According to Said, orientalism (the Western scholarship about the Eastern World) is inextricably tied to the imperialist societies who produced it, which makes much Orientalist work inherently political and servile to power. According to Said, in the Middle East, the social, economic, and cultural practices of the ruling Arab elites indicate they are imperial satraps who have internalized the romanticized "Arab Culture" created by French, British and, later, American Orientalists; the examples include critical analyses of the colonial literature of Joseph Conrad, which conflates a people, a time, and a place into a narrative of incident and adventure in an exotic land. The critical application of post-structuralism in the scholarship of Orientalism influenced the development of literary theory, cultural criticism, and the field of Middle Eastern studies, especially regarding how academics practice their intellectual inquiry when examining, describing, and explaining the Middle East. The scope of Said's scholarship established Orientalism as a foundation text in the field of post-colonial culture studies, which examines the denotations and connotations of Orientalism, and the history of a country's post-colonial period. As a public intellectual, Edward Said debated *Orientalism* with historians and scholars of area studies, notably, the historian Bernard Lewis, who described the thesis of Orientalism as "anti-Western". For subsequent editions of Orientalism, Said wrote an "Afterword" (1995) and a "Preface" (2003)addressing criticisms of the content, substance, and style of the work as cultural criticism. (Wikipedia)
What it’s like
Dense, unhurried academic prose that circles its subject like a lecturer pacing a seminar room: long sentences stacked with qualifications, frequent returns to the same argument from new angles, and passages of close reading that dwell on a single paragraph of a novel or travelogue until its assumptions come into view. The voice is sober and combative, sharpened by irony and a moral seriousness that never tips into melodrama. Its sensory world is almost entirely textual, a library of colonial travel writing, scholarship, and fiction that the author holds up to the light and examines line by line, so the atmosphere is one of quiet, sustained attention rather than scene or setting. Vibe: intellectually charged, stern, quietly indignant. It suits a slow weekday reading session with a pencil and a notebook, or a seminar reading list, more than a relaxed evening. Pacing is deliberate and cumulative, with the arguments building through repetition and revision rather than suspense. Its tone is critical and unsentimental; its people are mostly abstractions, scholars, writers and the societies they describe, rather than characters with arcs. There is no violence, gore, or sexual content, and the only sharpness is rhetorical. For readers of history, literary criticism, postcolonial studies, and anyone who wants argument rather than story.
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