Orientalism (c. 1750- ) is the set of ideas, images, stereotypes, facts, projections, lies and half-truths that the West has about the East, particularly the Middle East, what used to be called the Orient in Britain and France. It is the representation the West has built for itself about the East as the Other. At American universities it goes under names like “Middle Eastern Studies”.
Although Orientalism stretches back to the ancient Greeks and can take in all Asian and Muslim lands as “the East”, in practice it mainly concerns Arab Muslims and is mostly the work of the French, British and Germans from 1800 to 1950 and the Americans since then.
Edward Said, who grew up in the Middle East as an object of Orientalism, took a particular interest in it and wrote a book about it: “Orientalism” (1978).
He studied Orientalism by looking not just at scholarly writings and government reports but at all kinds of things written in the West about the Middle East, even works of fiction and poetry. Comparative literature is his stock in trade.
As a body these writings hang together because they all use the same Orientalist representation of the Middle East while helping to create and strengthen that representation, making it common wisdom in the West.
Western scholars are not boot-licking servants of Western imperialism who dutifully turn out self-serving lies for those in power. It is rarely that naked. But neither are they brains in a dish who look at the world as it is, unaffected by being bodies in the West:
- Their deepest loyalties are to the West and its power.
- They are taking part in an enterprise that is by and for Westerners.
- They are speaking for people in whose shoes they do not walk.
- They use Orientalism as a lens through which to look at the Middle East and therefore rarely escape it.
Western leaders, meanwhile, do not do whatever they like. They want to live and act in a world of fact and so depend on “the experts” – who are Orientalists. Power and knowledge go hand in hand.
Orientalism tends to see the Middle East as exotic, threatening, backward and highly religious. That does not come from close observation but from reading it as the opposite of the West, from seeing the West as best and the measure of all the rest, from seeing the Middle East as a dangerous and despised Other (Islamophobia).
The Middle East is hardly the great Other. European civilization grew out of the Middle East: cows, goats, sheep, wheat, wheels, letters, numbers, etc. Even God and coffee. When compared to the rest of the world, Christianity and Islam are almost the same religion. The Middle East has often been a military threat, but so would any neighbouring region. Different is just different, it does not have to be read as threatening, opposite, exotic or bad. Europe is “different” too. So is every part of the earth.
- The white lens
- Edward Said: Permission to Narrate
- Homi K. Bhabha
- white ethnographic gaze: the 1960s – white on black in America
- Tips on writing about Asian America
- discourse – Foucault
- hegemony – Gramsci