Orientalism

Orientalism has its origins in late literary theorist Edward Said's 1978 book by the same title. Orientalism is widely considered to be one of the most influential books of the 20th century, and its influences cross the humanities and social sciences. Said analyzed the writings and representations of Western European authorities on the region of the world they categorized as “The Orient,” with his particular interest focused on what most geography books would label Southwest Asia, the Middle East, and the Near East. Said's central claim was that this broad body of work had scripted a notion of the Orient as an exotic “other,” both repulsive and intriguing and unconnected to the long sweep of human cultural development that became—as a result of these Orientalists, Said argued—Europe's to claim.

What came to be referred to in this way as the Orientalizing of the Near East and its peoples was, Said contended, central to the imperialist projects of the West. By erasing the connectivity of civilizations and cultures of the region from the West's story and representing them as an exotic, bizarre, and inferior appendage, the Orientalists made colonial conquest a natural and logical extension of the rise of the West. Influenced by French philosopher Michel Foucault, Said sought to suggest that the Orientalists' discourse on the region had over time erased the real Orient or any alternative notion of regional identity.

Orientalism can be taken as one of the foundational texts of postcolonial studies, leading literary theorist Robert Young to consider Said to be one of the three[Page 344] main scholars (with Gayatri Chakrovarty Spivak and Homi Bhabha) to shape that field's development. It has created many imitators and spawned a growth industry of applications of its basic notions to other parts of the world where European imperialism has, these works claim, Orientalized the people it has conquered or erased. Scholars have taken the concept well beyond its literary origins and into the critical rereading of the representations of places found in postcards, art, architecture, and maps, among other devices. These latter categories captivate geographers, perhaps for obvious reasons, and it is no surprise to see many geographers influenced by this idea. The central ideas of Orientalism have, for instance, been deployed in important geography scholarship such as Derek Gregory's The Colonial Present. Gregory sought to show how the Western powers have reproduced and extended the Orientalist scripting of the Middle East in three contemporary conflict settings: Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq.

Orientalism has hardly been without its critics. Some critics seek to discredit the work and all that has come in its wake because they do not separate it from the political project of Palestinian human rights that was, by virtue of his long and bitter exile from his homeland, Said's life work. Other critics argue that his book is notably absent of the possibilities for voices of resistance within Middle Eastern countries to this othering process. Bhabha prominently extended Said's claims, even while criticizing them. In demonstrating that the connections between imperialist or colonialist rhetoric or discourse and realities on the ground often could be found wanting, Bhabha provoked a storm of interest in the muddled places in between the colonizer and the colonized. Bhabha pointed a host of scholars to the ambivalence, hybridity, and mimicry found in colonial representations of Orientalized places and, at the same time, to the same phenomena in the self-representations of colonized peoples. The latter thought is the jumping-off point for subaltern studies scholarship, commonly associated with Spivak. Subaltern studies scholars have problematized the question of the capacity for colonized peoples, such as those that the Orientalists critiqued by Said were writing about, to write back to the colonizers and subvert the discursive representations of them.

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