When was orientalism published

Like a mirror, the images reverse each other with the privileging on the side of the Occident. This Orient is a European idea and invention, not, as Said warned, essentially an idea with no correspondence in reality. The East is a European construction that facilitates a very real relationship of power and domination between West and East.

According to Gramsci certain cultural forms or representational discourses have dominance over others and reflect cultural leadership. Orientalism was a collective European notion of European superiority with the West having the upper hand.

The network of discursive structures was put in place by European scholars over time with the intention to understand to produce knowledge in order to control and manipulate a very different world: the Orient. The European encounter with the alien culture was not only a cultural clash but also a meeting between unequals.

By the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, the Orient was but a shadow of its former self. Soon everyone was inhaling and Baudelaire writes under the spell of the weed. The Western imagination was fevered by thoughts of the depravity of the East and, although Said did not discuss art, by the second decade of the nineteenth century, Ingres was painting his many paintings of the legendary harems and Delacroix actually paid a visit to the secluded ladies of Algiers.

It is at this point in time, the early decades of the 19th century, when the West was actively changing the West, Lewis wrote,. Some centuries earlier, the Islamic Middle East had led he world in science and technology, including devices for measuring time. But Middle-Eastern technology and science ceased to develop,precisely at the moment when Europe and more specifically Western Europe was advancing to new heights.

The disparity was gradual but progressive. Not only could Western powers come and go in the Middle East as they pleased, but it was also at this time that the East became the object of the European gaze.

As Foucault stated in Discipline and Punish , to see is to produce knowledge and to have power. Europe is powerful and articulate; Asia is defeated and distant. The Orient is insinuating and dangerous; and Western rationality is undermined by Eastern excesses. These literary characterizations fulfilled two needs, first to justify the domination of one group over the other and second to create an identity for the dominant group.

The Orient was contained and represented within the dominating framework. The rise of Orientalism as a system of representation coincides with the rise of European empires. The Orientalists. New York: Laynfaroh, Courtesy Mathaf Gallery, London. Davies, Kristian. The custom is not so rigidly observed as formerly, and in India it has almost entirely disappeared. Among the Persians and Egyptians, however, it is still a general proactive, and will no doubt continue, for in those centuries the immigration of foreigners has failed to influence the customs of the natives.

In the street of Cairo at the World's Fair there was exhibited the peculiar manners of the Egyptians, and a veiled lady was of course one of the curious objects displayed, though she did not always appear in that unsightly disguise, thus proving that she was not a slave to this requirement of all Mohammodan [sic] women.

The Magic City. Louis: Historical Publishing Co. The picture above does not represent Selim as looking pleased. But that is nothing. These people do not express their pleasure by wreathed smiles. He is asleep. Chicago never is. She is not very attractive as to features but for all that she possessed sufficient influence over Selim to induce him to forswear his Christian faith and become a Mohammedan for her sweet sake.

As Arabs go this is undoubtedly a happy family. Selim has his hookah stem in his mouth and his scimeter in one hand, and though he is scowling fiercely it is no doubt his habitual expression. He would probably look much worse should he attempt to smile. There is constant rivalry between the tribe of Hassan, who are camel riders, and the tribe of Hagi who are horse riders.

Perhaps Selim is meditating vengeance upon one of the Hagi. Has anyone of you read this book? I am sorry that the author did not live long enough to that Europeans were not terribly askewed in their notion of orient. Time somewhat proved them correct. Tanuj Solanki How do you think time has proved the Europeans correct? See all 9 questions about Orientalism….

Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 4. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Start your review of Orientalism. Apr 11, Erica rated it really liked it. The following is a true story: Me, in a San Franscisco bar reading Orientalism. The blonde girl next to me reading over my shoulder: "So what's Orientalism? Her: "There are so many isms in Asia - like Buddhism and Taoism.

You know what book you should read? The Tao of Poo. It's sooo good. It's, like, the perfect way to teach Americans about Eastern Religion. View all 33 comments. Jan 07, J. Keely rated it liked it Shelves: lit-crit , non-fiction , reviewed. There's a curious double-standard between what we expect from White guy authors compared to authors of any other background. When an author is a Native American, for example, we tend to expect their books to deliver to us the 'Native American experience'.

If the author is a woman, we tend to expect that her book will show us the 'female perspective'--to the degree that female authors who write stories about men are forced to take on a masculine or nondescript name, like J. So we get We There's a curious double-standard between what we expect from White guy authors compared to authors of any other background.

So we get Western-educated authors like Achebe , Hosseini , and Momaday who write thoroughly traditional novels in the Western style and then place a thin veneer of their own ethnic background onto those stories, and are praised for it in academia, because their work meets expectation: delivering to The West a simplified and 'pre-colonized' version of foreignness.

As a White male author, on the other hand, the expectation is that you won't stick to your own cultural identity, but will instead attempt to explore the breadth and depth of human experience through characters of many backgrounds--and why not?

White guys have been doing it for centuries, and we love them for it. In fact, the problem here is not that White guys are encouraged to take on other roles, its that non-White, non-male folks are discouraged from doing so.

As Said points out: it is not only Black people who are capable of writing about Black people, or only Arabs about Arabs, or only Whites about Whites; we all need to explore similarities and differences in our fellow humans. So here I am: White guy, trying to explore humanity, writing a bit of fiction about Colonialism, about the English rule in Egypt and India, featuring characters of different backgrounds--but it's daunting.

I don't want to do it thoughtlessly, and though I take a great deal of inspiration from Haggard, Kipling, Conrad, and Burton, I don't want to incidentally adopt their shortcomings along with the interesting bits. So I thought I might combat their prejudices by taking in the most notable and talked-about book on interactions and stereotypes between The West and The East. However, Orientalism was not what I expected; but then again, it wasn't what Said expected, either.

The whole of the book is Said looking closely at a dozen authors, mostly French and English, some academics, some fiction writers, and giving examples of a number of quotes for each where they talk about 'The East' in ways that demonstrate a certain bias. That's pretty much it, all four-hundred pages. Why spend that long on such a specific topic? Because this book was meant for a small academic publication, and that's what specialized academics do. Now, if you've read any of the other reviews of this book on GR, you'd get the impression that Said is an enraged polemicist who spends the whole book denigrating 'The West' and praising 'The East'.

Indeed, once I realized the scope of this work and that it wasn't likely to help with my specific writing concern , I almost abandoned it, but I wanted to get to the 'angry Said' part where he defames Western civilization, just to see how bad it got. It never came. Said's tone throughout the book is exceedingly dry and cautious--too much so, for my taste, I've been known to enjoy a good diatribe--so any prejudicial anger a reader might find in this book is only what they brought in with them.

The notion that Said is anti-Western or Pro-Islam is such a bizarrely inexplicable misreading that the only reason a reader could come away from the book with that belief is if they brought in a huge set of prejudices and then ignored everything Said actually wrote. There is no more unity between all Islamic nations than there is between all Christian nations. Trying to place a line between Greece and Turkey and claiming these are separate cultures is artificial.

This is not in and of itself something to be lamented; the specific form of the satellite relationship, however, is. But then, the fact that there are prejudiced readers is hardly surprising: the world is full of people trying to divide everything up between 'us' and 'them'.

I get comments from people who don't realize that Islam is an Abrahamic religion--sharing the same holy books, prophets, and god as Christianity and Judaism--people who aren't aware that a 'fatwa' just means any public statement by a scholar.

You read about American military consultants in the Middle East who don't know the difference between Shia and Sunni. Very few these days would connect this quote: "The ink of the scholar is more precious than the blood of the martyr" with Mohammed.

I remember seeing a supposedly humorous map where the Middle East was replaced by an impact crater, with the words 'Problem Solved' beneath it, completely ignoring the fact that the reason there is constant conflict there is because powerful First World countries have gone in, supplied both sides with cheap guns, made Opium the only profitable crop for farmers to grow, and set up regimes whose sole purpose is to funnel money and natural resources out of those countries and into multinational banks--any region is going to be politically unstable under those conditions.

Of course, the way Arabs are commonly typified as backward is the same way people typify ant outgroup: the cliches of American rednecks and hippy-dippy liberals are the same as the cliche Arab: ignorant, sectarian, ever-feuding, following charismatic leaders into reactionary movements.

I was constantly struck by the fact that the separation Said depicts between the ideas of East and West were not specific to that cultural conflict, but were the same generic type of power separation laid out by Marx: a dominating power structure versus the population whom they control and profit from.

They operate off of the same self-serving justifications for their rule: that the population is childlike and irrational, easily manipulated, and in need of governance. Extending the narrow focus of his argument and showing that this is how power works everywhere, at all times, would have made his work stronger, overall.

As I read, it seemed that what Said was saying was clearly true, but not in a revelatory way. I kept waiting for Said to take it to the next level, to elevate these basic, naked observations to some profound and insightful conclusion. Of course European, Christian powers would mythologize and simplify Islam, of course they would make a phantom enemy of it, while at the same time trading, allying, and sharing sources of inspiration with it--that is no more than differing cultures have always done, as Said points out.

What great insight into this system is meant to shock me? Am I simply too much the postmodern, atheistic American to see what he says as anything but basic and inescapable? Of course we are all Quixote and Pangloss: making ourselves heroes of a fantastical narrative and creating enemies to blame because we are too weak to do anything other than maintain that flattering fiction.

But, even if we are all human, and all power structures operate in the same ways, there should still be some specifics which set this incidence apart. I was waiting for Said to do some serious unpacking.

This is an academic work with a very narrow scope. It is meant to give a view of a very specific trend in Orientalist criticism amongst a group of authors, and not to force on the reader any specific conclusion about what this trend means, or how it operates on a minute level, except to point out that it does in fact exist, and that it represents familiar power dynamics. That is the purpose and the effect of this book, and it invites the reader to use it to extend these examples into specific arguments and observations of their own, to use the general roadmap provided as a guide for their own work.

Since Said is not specific, we cannot know just how accurate his analysis is unless we can compare it to our own readings of the same works, so it can only be a companion to our studies and not a work which, on its own, develops a unique view which we can use, as scholars, going forward. View all 37 comments. Apr 17, Trevor I sometimes get notified of comments rated it it was amazing Shelves: religion , history , social-theory.

This is a fascinatingly interesting book. It is also a book that is virtually required reading if you are going to say anything at all about post-colonialism. Whether you agree or disagree with the central theme of the book is almost beside the point. This work is seminal and landmark — so it can be avoided only at your own cost. I think, if I only wanted to get an idea of what the book This is a fascinatingly interesting book.

Look, it is all beautifully written and utterly fascinating too — but like I said, life is short and this is the sort of book that covers more ground that you might feel you really need covered.

Said is tracing the history of an idea and in that idea the exotic East was the Middle East long before it was the Far East. That is what makes this book essential reading. If there is one thing that is increasingly being used to define our understanding of the world today — in the way that the Cold War defined our world for large parts of the 20th Century — it is the relationship between the West and Islam.

That we are pluralistic, they are clones. The main lesson of this book is to beware as soon as anyone starts using the word WE. It can be the most dangerous word in the language. The Orient has long been a place where Westerners have projected their lusts, their dreams and their nightmares. In fact, Orientalism says infinitely more about the West than it does about whatever we choose define as the Orient.

The problem is one of essentialism. It requires us to have a single notion of what a Muslim is — as if this religion covering so many millions of people and having lasted for centuries and centuries could really, somehow remain self-identical across all of that time and all of that space. And it gets worse. Not only are they all the same, but they are also too stupid to even understand the first thing about themselves.

It is only because of we remarkably generous Westerners being able to explain their history to them, their language, society and character, that they have any ideas about themselves at all.

This is the role of the Orientalist, a role he and from what I can gather from this book it does seem to virtually always be a he has played rather consistently over the centuries. The Orient really reached its glory days a long time ago — you have to remember that much of our mathematics and virtually all of our Classical Philosophy came from Islamic scholars.

So, to explain this we need to see Islam and the Orient as a culture in decay, a culture that is degenerating. But still a text nonetheless. And a text that can only be read by a properly schooled Western scholar. And what is the appropriate schooling for such a scholar? Well, not necessarily Oriental texts, as you might think — but rather texts about the Orient by previous Oriental scholars. This is like an entire school of Shakespeare scholarship that never actually refers to any of the poems or plays, but rather discusses previous works of scholarship on Shakespeare.

And like such scholarship the assumption is that the plays never change — just as it is assumed the Orient and those who live there never changes either. Of course, our television makes this unity of the Orient something that is self-evident. Other than Israel, the rest of the region is self-identical. This was made particularly clear during the so called Arab Spring when an image of an Arab in headgear shaking his fist could have been someone revolting in Libya, or Tunisia, or Egypt, or Syria — and fortunately from our perspective in the West all of these countries were identical and had identical problems and were resolving those identical problems in exactly the same way.

Through unreason and violence — that is, a particularly Oriental and non-Western way. If this book is anything, it is a plea for us to recognise the humanity of the other — of the Arab other in this case. For example, when I hear that the USA spends more on healthcare than any other nation or how much an average Australian spends on education, I become worried. People who talk in averages are not to be trusted — there, a generalisation you can rely on in a review telling you not to rely on generalisations.

What people who talk in averages are about to say next is generally a lie. Averages are lies told in numbers. Aggregating humans as if all you need to say about them is that they are Arabs or Americans or Australians and then thinking that is somehow all you needed to say, that a single label can explain entire human cultures, is the stuff of racist fantasy. Unfortunately, the work of learning about other cultures cannot be done by pouring them into a single bucket and giving them a single name.

People are insanely complex and the societies they make are even more so. To imagine for a second that by calling a society Arabic or Islamic suddenly makes it any easier to understand says far more about the person pointing their finger and calling names than it does about those on the receiving end. This book is a mirror held up before us whoever that US is — we should have the courage to look squarely into that mirror and learn the lesson it is trying to teach us.

Highly recommended, essential reading. View all 35 comments. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn't trust the evidence of one's eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission civilizatrice. They think that superimposing their ways, their systems of politics and culture, is actually going to benefit others. So they force it on people; they make them adapt to their ways and engage in a mode of totalitarian control that does nothing but destroy individualistic culture and history; thus, unfolds the history of mankind.

Edward Said keeps his arguments relatively in the present, at least, from the perspective of the way the current eyes of the Occidental view the Oriental. He mainly discusses how the legacies of fairly recent Empires, namely the British powers, have contributed to this lasting effect. Man has been doing this sort of thing for the last thousand years; it just means now he has the media and literary power to make such racial stereotypes and prejudices widely known, however accidental or purposeful.

Orientalism can be recorded more effectively. When reading books such as this I find it hard not to fall into misanthropy, as I look at the current political climate the world faces; ultimately, asking myself the question: will man ever learn? I digress here; the point is Said captures an argument vital to comprehending the way the world, unfortunately, works. How many people will actually read this in their lifetime?

How many people have even heard of it? The truth of the matter is this is a deeply important book; it demonstrates how the West has created this fog like gaze when it looks at the East. Whilst trying not to sound too general here, what it sees is an image of falsehood.

Please note, Joyce is but one example of countless. Always there lurks the assumption that although the Western consumer belongs to a numerical minority, he is entitled either to own or to expend or both the majority of the world resources. Because he, unlike the Oriental, is a true human being.

Here we have an Arab riding a camel waving a rifle in the air like a lunatic. We live in an internet age where we can find anything out if we really want to.

But go back a hundred years and the general person reading this story and seeing this poster would have taken it for fact. Granted, the educated and perhaps even pseudo-educated may have had qualms with it, but the average reader would have seen it and believed it. Again, this is but one example. Imagine it duplicated ten-fold, seen in every Western representation of the East and you have cultural conditioning that leaves the populace with this false notion of the Oriental world.

And then it is passed on through the years leaving the lasting impression of racist stereotypes. The sad thing is, as I write this, this sense of Orientalism is still in the world today. Sure, it may not be as bad, but it is bad enough. And he really did need to write it, to help educate people on their own folly. But, again, not many outside the realms of scholarship, arguably the ones most likely to manifest these false perceptions, will actually read it.

Simply put, this is a complex book. My review scarcely scratches the surface in regards to the depth of some of these arguments. This is a book for the relatively well-read. I tried it a few years ago during the first year of my undergraduate degree and was overwhelmed by some of the prose. Even now as I read it I find the arguments complex and warranting a second read. The point is, this book portrays an erudite scholarly voice.

Although these arguments are vital, the book can be daunting at times for those new to literary criticism and cultural analysis. For me, this a book to work up to rather than dive into, and for students of postcolonial theory it is a book that simply must be finished- even if it takes you a year as it has in my case! View all 13 comments.

Jul 07, Thomas rated it really liked it Shelves: own-physical , nonfiction. An intelligent and insightful book about how the West has stereotyped and dehumanized the East through racist and oppressive representations of the East as backwards, uncivilized and in need of Western revitalization or aid.

Edward Said writes at length about the origins and development of Orientalism throughout history and how it has culminated in and contributed to anti-Arab sentiments. He raises important and thought-provoking questions about interrogating how places are represented, who has An intelligent and insightful book about how the West has stereotyped and dehumanized the East through racist and oppressive representations of the East as backwards, uncivilized and in need of Western revitalization or aid.

He raises important and thought-provoking questions about interrogating how places are represented, who has the power to create representations, and what are the consequences of those representations.

But Orientalism has taken a further step than that: it views the Orient as something whose existence is not only displayed but has remained fixed in time and place for the West. The West is the actor, the Orient a passive reactor. The West is the spectator, the judge and jury, of every facet of Oriental behavior.

Yet if history during the twentieth century has provoked intrinsic change in and for the Orient, the Orientalist is stunned. View all 7 comments. It is a penetrating view of various racial stereotypes of Arab peoples dressed in sheets smoking hookahs and generally under-educated and prone to laziness and violence that pervades all levels of society and served the interests of colonialism to appease consciences of all the violence and subjugation that occurred in China, India the Middle East and Northern Africa.

Particularly in these troubled times with racial slurs against Muslims becoming common currency amd electoral policy , it remains relevant and eye-opening. Highly recommended along with its sequel, Culture and Imperialism. View all 3 comments. Oct 02, Michael rated it really liked it Shelves: , recs. Across three wide-ranging chapters Said tracks the history of Orientalism as an oppressive style of thought based on epistemological and ontological distinctions between the orient and the occident, in which the former is framed as despotic, hyper-sexual, and feminine and the latter as democratic, rational, and masculine.

Shelves: favourites. I have just read the copious notes I made when I read it in sort of ironic that I read a westerner's gloss rather than re-reading the original!? It sounds absurd, yet the same attitude is reproduced constantly, including by mainstream feminists. Insofar as it studied Oriental texts, it interpreted them according to sweeping generalisations, never the human particular. The words of an ancient poet would be used as the foundation for foreign policy.

Visitors to the actual geographical Middle East were disappointed not to find the world described in classic orientalist texts, and interpreted this as the further, because orientalist dogma starts from an assumption of faded glory degeneration of the Orient!

Confrontation with reality has not disrupted the othering construction of orientalism; everything is digested and processed by it. For example, by the Orient described by 17th 18th century texts could not be recognised anywhere. Yet since one of the dogmas of orientalism is that the Orient cannot change, this new and strange place is out of order, full of pathological 'dis-orientals' and, I might cheekily offer, 'rogue states' which 'we have lost'.

National liberation movements shattered the image of passive, fatalistic subject populations, but they were replaced with the image of 'extremists' who were not true to their real passive fatalistic natures. Anticolonial movements are interpreted as insults to Western democracy. R Gibb argued that Islam is fundamentally flawed, yet cannot change.

Any attempt to change it is a betrayal. Orientalism ignores class interests, political circumstances and economic factors. There is only the unchanging oriental character to consider. Any change in knowledge of orientalism takes place in the latter category, never deconstructing the former. American orientalism is even more reductive, with none of the imaginative investment of European orientalism, but with the same cultural hostility and imperial projects.

Arabic is studied for policy objectives. The liberal veneer: 'we' study 'others' to get to know them, understand their cultures, so we allow them to represent themselves within the confining space of orientalism Principle dogmas of orientalism: 1. The West is rational, developed, humane, superior while the Orient is underdeveloped, aberrant, inferior 2. Abstracts are always preferable to direct evidence since Orientals cannot be trusted 3. The Orient is uniform and unchanging, incapable of self definition, and the generalised and systematic vocabulary of orientalism used to describe it is entirely objective.

The Orient is to be feared, pacified by research and development, preferably occupied. The central myth is the 'arrested development of the semites'; Western power enables the reproduction of this myth. Methodological failures of orientalism cannot be accounted for by saying the real Orient is different from orientalist portrayals or that orientalists, being Westerners, can have no inner sense of what the Orient is all about: Orientals are now educated in native lands in colonial founded underfunded universities with no good libraries and too many students.

Said asks: How does one represent another culture? What is another culture? For example, in Shalimar the Clown Rushdie presents a complex and shifting picture of religious identity in Kashmir; Islam is complicated by context and is not at all the same everywhere.

View all 14 comments. Jun 04, DoctorM rated it it was ok Shelves: critical-theory , postcolonial. Yes in many ways, Said's "Orientalism" is a classic.