Orientalism

The term Orientalism—the study of the cultures of the East—has no single fixed meaning and historically has gone through various phases. In earlier discourse, it had a wider scope and was seen in a positive light. It was associated with the substantial contributions made by Western scholars in the field of Arabic, Turkish, Indic, Hebraic, Chinese, and Persian studies. It was the late Edward Said's groundbreaking 1978 work Orientalism that led to the term becoming a highly contentious one. In Said's view, Orientalism is not simply about the study of the East, it is about the West having power over the Orient by representing, codifying, and classifying knowledge about other cultures. Although there were other European and Islamic scholars who highlighted this aspect, it was ...