Orientalism

Reading Edward Said’s book as an undergraduate expanded my intellectual horizons and made me want to be a historian. Said showed that empire not only included the events—war, exploitation, extraction—that happened “out there” but also shaped metropolitan ways of knowing about and relating to areas of the world under colonial domination.

Said shows us that the power to know about a place and its people and to shape how that place and its people are known was central to the consolidation of imperial rule in the nineteenth century and its continuance in the twentieth.

More than that, however, Said showed… show more.

Another classic work that inspired my passion for the domain that I work in.

Saïd thoroughly illustrates how media agenda setting and framing, socio-cultural biases and generalisation impact the way we see the world. It is largely driven by clichés and stereotypes. What is needed is “respect for the concrete detail of human experience, understanding that arises from viewing the Other compassionately, knowledge gained and diffused through moral and intellectual honesty.”

I couldn’t agree more.

A classic of classics in understanding the west representation of the East. It made me make sense of why in many instances the West's media portrayal of Arabs and Muslims culturally, socially, and politically has been a repetitive list of stereotypical images, as if these societies and its people are static and not capable of change. Many scholars have argued over the years that Orientalism as a thesis has become redundant. I have argued and still do that it is still alive and kicking and has been manifesting itself in the daily news coverage year after year. 

Orientalism is often credited with inaugurating the field of Postcolonial Studies, though there were other foundational texts published around the same time, such as Partha Mitter’s 1977 Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art. In the half-century since Said published Orientalism, a whole school of thought has coalesced around its essential insights. Postcolonial Studies is, for me, an essential facet of Monsters Studies (which also relies heavily on concepts and approaches developed in Gender and Sexuality Studies, Critical Race Studies, and Posthumanism). While many critics have identified important flaws in Said’s book (most notably… show more.

This 1978 published book drove immense controversy. Orientalism pushed heated debates surrounding the nature of Western attitudes towards the Middle East. It pushed millions of people to rethink their prejudices. Said argued that throughout Western history, writers on the Middle East, regardless of the somewhat varying attitudes of their day, reinforced an image of Arabs as uniform, incompetent, and unreflective. But to Said, “the Orient” was a creation of the Western imagination. This work spurred the removal of insensitive words at the beginning of Aladdin. I value this book because it allows us to see how the media is… show more.

Said explains with extraordinary clarity how Orientalism – a way of seeing that exaggerates and distorts differences of Arab peoples and cultures as compared to that of Europe and the U.S. – often perceives Arab culture as exotic, backward, uncivilized, fatalistic, superstitious, and at times dangerous, while being at the same time impervious to progress and in need of regeneration by the far superior European colonial powers that be. An entertaining and thought-provoking book, sometimes hilarious, Said consistently witty and incisive.