Orientalism

In his groundbreaking book Orientalism, Edward Said systematically studies Western scholarship on and representation of the Near East or the Arab world. Focusing on British, French, and U.S. thinkers and artists since the 19th century, Said argues that rather than pure, objective, and disinterested scholarship and cultural practices, Orientalism aims to discursively subjugate the East. It belongs to the imperial drive to, rephrasing Socrates, “know thy colony” and control it. Said incisively diagnoses Orientalist representations as projecting Western desires onto the Orient, rendering the Other as shadow of the Self. The Orient is thus turned into stereotypes of extremities, or the Western Self's aspirations for beauty and love, such as the Islamic harem or Madame Butterfly, and abject fears, such as barbarism and opium. As a result, the Orientalist formula dictates that the Orient is polarized, emptied of psychological depth and subjectivity. The extremes of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's “A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!” in Kubla Khan is split between the demonic and the domestic, with the exotic unfolding in the most predictable manner. The West projects its own neuroses onto the opposing constructs of, among others, Khans and Shangri-las, of the Mongolian horde and the Tibetan religiosity. Inherent in both ends of Orientalist stereotypes are transgressions and taboos that the West must shun otherwise. At a time when science and reason are secularizing the West, the need for myth and what lies beyond reason is displaced onto the Orient. Orientalism, hence, allows the West to articulate its own repressions in the name of representing the East. Thus, the West creates an identity for the Orient based on Western rather than Eastern ideas and notions. This entry focuses on the theoretical framework underlying Said's work, the response to Orientalism, and its application in the realm of global capitalism.