Orientalism

Exploring Orientalism

Said was influenced by a number of scholars, including Jacques Derrida and Frantz Fanon, but methodologically drew from the French philosopher Michel Foucault's concept of discourse analysis. Said's critique of Orientalism used this method to show how the colonization of the Orient had been enabled and justified through Orientalist discourse. While Foucault contended that the individual author was virtually insignificant in creating discursive formations, Said aimed to expose the dialectic between the author and the overarching discursive body. The texts that Said examined were primarily those of high culture from the West (largely art and literature) but united a number of seemingly disparate spheres such as policy, academic knowledge, and popular cultural production. Through his analysis, Said sought to explore the ways in which the Orient was represented as pejorative throughout history and into the modern day. He argued that Orientalism was based on an ontological and epistemologi-cal division between the West and the Orient.

Said understood Orientalism to be predicated on the separation between the Self and the Other. This separation relies not only on the assignment of difference to the Other but also a desire for that difference. Representations of the Orient and Orientals were thus shown by Said to reflect European fantasies of the exoticized Other in addition to those representations that portrayed Orientals as unskilled, infantile, and bellicose. All these representations, however, remained inherently essentialist. Using stereotypical depictions, they culturally constructed the Orient as a homogeneous whole, neglecting all nuances present in reality. Because Said saw all writing, thought, and cultural production as political, all texts were political and laced with the prevailing cultural hegemony of the time period. Said's own lifelong political commitment to the cause of the Palestinian people was intimately bound up with his critique of Orientalism.

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