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What Is ‘Orientalism’?
Edward Said’s definition of the term
In 1978, the Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said wrote a book called Orientalism. It’s insightful and clearly expressed, though its length may put off some potential readers. It’s an important book for me because I’ve been interested in “Western” literary representations of “Eastern” eunuchs, and what Said has written explains a lot of that.
What Is ‘Orientalism’?
Orientalism is “a system of ideological fictions.” It’s “not even trying to be accurate,” Said says, so its accuracy is not the best way to approach or understand it.
It’s a primarily British and French perspective of how a region they call “the Orient” has been “an integral part of European material civilization and culture.” Regarding the region as an actual place, Europeans have sought “to capture it, treat it, describe it, improve it, radically alter it.”
Simultaneously, the idea of the Orient offers a symbolic mirror-image of post-Enlightenment Europe; it’s the “contrasting image, idea, personality, experience.” Sometimes it symbolizes simply “a particular form of eccentricity,” “a living tableau of queerness.” For Quinet, it meant religion (in dialogue with Western science). Other times, it means people who “have never understood the meaning of self-government the way ‘we’ do.”
In any case, this portrayal is made “for Europe, and only for Europe.”
And by the way, he says, “the American understanding of the Orient will seem considerably less dense.”
Orientalism isn’t primarily defined by ignorance or bigotry. In fact, by the mid-19th century, scholars had made it “a treasure-house of learning,” and they had “a systematic discipline of accumulation.” Someone like Burton understood that he was encountering people with their own culture, history, beliefs, and ways of knowledge. However, Orientalism is at least compatible with ignorance or bigotry. It’s “a kind of Western projection onto a will to govern over the Orient.”
If you take the idea of the East literally in a geographical sense, it’s half the planet. That’s why Orientalist topics have “an almost infinite capacity for subdivision.” Said finds it’s possible to separate European…
