Edward Said's book "Orientalism" and his criticism of colonial writers.

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Orientalism

Edward Said was born in Jerusalem in 1935 and was for many years America’s foremost spokesman for the Palestinian cause. His writings have been translated into 26 languages, including his most influential book, Orientalism (1978), an examination of the way the West perceives the Islamic world.

Orientalism is a book published in 1978 by Edward Said that has been highly influential and controversial in postcolonial studies. ‘Orientalism’ is a long standing way of identifying the east as the other and inferior to the west.

east is the repository or projection of the aspects of the west which the Westerners choose not to acknowledge.

paradoxiacally, east is also seen as the land of the exotic, the mystical and the seductive.

people there are anonymous masses and not individuals

their actions are determined by instictive emotions and not reason

emotions and reactions are determined by racial consideration rather than because of individual status or circumstance (ie, they are like this because they are black or orientals).

A central idea of Orientalism is that Western knowledge about the East is not generated from facts or reality, but from preconceived archetypes that envision all “Eastern” societies as fundamentally similar to one another, and fundamentally dissimilar to “Western” societies. This a priori knowledge establishes “the East” as antithetical to “the West.” Such Eastern knowledge is constructed with literary texts and historical records that often are of limited understanding of the facts of life in the Middle East.

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Orientalism questioned a pattern of misrepresentation of the non-western world.

Said directly challenged what Euro-American scholars traditionally referred to as "Orientalism." Orientalism is an entrenched structure of thought, a pattern of making certain generalizations about the part of the world known as the 'East'. As Said puts it:

“Orientalism was ultimately a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, West, "us") and the strange (the Orient, the East, "them").”

The stereotypes assigned to Oriental cultures and "Orientals" as individuals are pretty specific: Orientals are despotic and clannish. They are despotic when placed ...

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