Orientalism

Until the late 1970s, Orientalism was taken to refer to a cultural or intellectual interest in the East. Orientalist scholars achieved expertise in the culture, literature, and arts of the region, and cultural fashions of Orientalist design came and went in Europe. However, in his pathbreaking 1978 book, Edward Said argues, following Michel Foucault, that Orientalism is not an innocent form of knowledge of a certain part of the world; rather, it is a form of power/knowledge that divides the world into two spheres—a binary imaginary geography of inside and outside, Occident and Orient. This means that the concept of difference between East and West is a geopolitical division written throughout the texts of Western culture, whether travel writing, political texts, paintings, or academic discussions. To Said, all of the cultures of northern Africa east to Southeast Asia and the South Seas have been lumped together by the Western geographical imagination into a singular “Orient.” The space of the Orient was defined by texts that preceded experience.

Said argued that Orientalism was comprised of a series of discourses that explained the inherently different natures of Orient and Occident, and the relationship between these two geographical areas. These discourses were based around a series of unequal binary pairs. Said (1978, 72) has suggested that in Orientalism, Orientals “are always symmetrical to, and yet diametrically inferior to, a European equivalent, which is sometimes specified, sometimes not.” Taxonomies of difference in the history of Western thought have not allowed the existence of “different but equal.”

Said argues that Orientalism is central not just to the West's understanding of the rest but, more importantly, the West's understanding of its own identity. Frantz Fanon (1967) had earlier argued that Europe was created not only by the third world both in a material sense of the extraction of labor and materials from the colonies supporting the development of modern European societies but also—and this is what is so important about Said's contribution—by the epistemological division of the world into categories of inside and outside. The existence of an irrational, timeless, and traditional East reinforced the mirror image: the rational, dynamic, and scientific Europe.

Said argued that Europeans looked to the Orient for confirmation of their superiority: discourses of progress and evolution suggesting that the West was more advanced than the East. It was “the white man's burden” to intervene and save the Oriental from degeneracy or helplessness (an idea that can be seen to continue in much contemporary development discourse). At the same time as representing the Orient through revulsion, a Western fascination with the East was insinuated throughout consumer culture. Writers in Victorian Britain warned of the sexual depravity of the Orient but enjoyed it voyeuristically through paintings and the displays of goods and people of empire in the great exhibitions of the time. Many Orientalist paintings represented women reveling in pleasure in wild sensuality, which would have been impossible to depict of respectable European women at the time (although working-class women were often represented in similar ways to Oriental women in much bourgeois culture of the period). Paintings focused on the erotic and on excess, and male fantasies played out in sites of languid opulence. While most Europeans would never experience the Orient for themselves, vivid accounts of travel to the East were incredibly popular, being outsold only by religious texts in nineteenth century Britain. Such travelers' tales wrote the Orient as a space of danger within which heroic explorers proved themselves through trials of hardship. Their illustrated talks around the country packed in crowds on lecture circuits to the amateur geographical societies, which arose in the nineteenth century, while the Royal Geographical Society in London was one of the most fashionable London societies.

...