M. Shahid Alam — Native Orientalism

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Ironically, the enormous success of Edward Said’s Orientalism, his devastating critiquing of the West’s hegemonic discourse on the ‘Orient,’ has deflected attention from the recrudescence of a native Orientalism in much of the Periphery in the last few decades. Its victory in Pakistan is nearly complete...[so that] In the euphoria of Edward Said’s success, left intellectuals have nearly forgotten that the West’s servant classes in the Periphery produce an indigenous Orientalism. I refer here to the coarser but more pernicious Orientalism of the brown Sahibs, who are free, behind their rhetoric of progress, to denigrate their own history and culture. A few of these native Orientalists are deracinated souls, who put down their own people for failing, as they see it, to keep up with the forward march of history. Most, however, are opportunists, lackeys, or wannabee lackeys, eager to join the native racketeers who manage the Periphery for the benefit of outside powers.

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Source: Alam, M. Shahid. "Native Orientalists at the Daily Times," 30 November 2009. At Pulse (https://pulsemedia.org). Accessed 25 April 2017.

 

Galen Amstutz — Asian Studies & Orientalist Games

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And yet the construction of Japan as radically Other is still one of the most widely played games in Asian studies, a game that benefits both Japanese and Western players. For Japanese players it provides a modernist, essentialist, pseudo-traditional way to construct Japanese identity without having to rely on real Japanese cultural resources like Shin Buddhism. For Western players it allows access to the classic motivation of the Orientalist: the reification of the exotic, which is based on the colonization of the Other according to the interests of the colonizer rather than upon a wide-open hermeneutical encounter (Said 1978, pp. 1–28). (p. 173)

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Source: Gran, Amstutz, Galen “Missing Hongan-ji in Japanese Studies.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 23 1-2 (1996): 155-178.

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Srinivas Aravamudan — Enlightenment Orientalism

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Enlightenment Orientalism increased its influence by featuring moral philosophy as well as libertine politics. I would argue, contra Said’s statement in the epigraph, that Enlightenment Orientalism was not “a corporate institution for dealing with the Orient” but a fictional mode for dreaming with the Orient—dreaming with it by constructing and translating fictions about it, pluralizing views of it, inventing it, by reimagining it, unsettling its meaning, brooding over it. In short, Enlightenment Orientalism was a Western style for translating, anatomizing, and desiring the Orient. And without examining Enlightenment Orientalism as a fictional mode, one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture is able to manage—and even produce both the novel and the Orient politically, sociologically, ideologically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period. Said acknowledged as much with his more nuanced appreciation of European literary aesthetics in his later monography Culture and Imperialism.

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Source: Aravamudan, Srinivas. Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.

 

Negar Azimi — Said's Disciples

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Like all fashionable rubrics, Orientalism was reduced, commodified.  Even today, most people who lean on Said’s ideas haven’t read his book all the way through.  (Have you?)  Students often came away from the work with a one-dimensional narrative of exploitation, the violence of representation.  While some scholars quibbled with the text – point out how Said reified several of his own critiques – the dominant mode was praise.  Incalculable dissertations, talks, and books on how cinema, literature, the media – take your pick – indulged in noxious stereotypes of ‘the Orient’ (quotation marks are mine) came to be.  Hidden agendas were uncovered.  But the new orthodoxy sometimes re-creates the straightjacket of its predecessors.  Under Orientalism’s influence, cultural output was policed for authenticity and pilloried for lack of ‘nuance’ – a word I once used with great frequency and eventually came to loathe.  The consensus had grown predictable, stifling even.  It didn’t have to be this way.  It’s disappointing that mainstream readings of Orientalism don’t embrace a term drawn from music that Said, a classically trained pianist, was extra fond of: the notion of the contrapuntal – two or more voices or melodies, give equal weight – intimating multiple dimensions.  Inasmuch as the history he charted was one of exploitation, it was also one of exchange... Said knew that his work was being misused, abused.  In later years, he admitted that Orientalism, ‘almost in a Borgesian way, has become several books'.

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Source: Azimi, Negar. “Revisiting Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism’ 40 Years On,” 28 October 2018.  At Frieze (https://frieze.com), accessed 13 January 2020.

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Asef Bayat — Nineteenth-Century Orientalism

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In the classical 19th Century Orientalism, the Orient (and here my focus is on the Muslim Middle East) was presented as essentially monolithic, fundamentally static, and basically traditional society and culture. The Orient was then a ‘peculiar’ entity, a universe essentially ‘different’ from the West; it was exotic and feminine, irrational and emotional, despotic and basically inferior to the West. A fixed and unchanging Islam stood as the key determinant of the Orient’s culture and society. Engrained in the people’s psyche, such Islam shaped Muslim’s values and day-to-day conducts, ensuring a fundamental cultural uniformity and a spectacular historical continuity throughout the Muslim World. Writing on Indians, James Mill, for instance, suggested ‘No idea of any system of rule, different from the will of a single person, appears to have entered the minds of them’. For Hegel, the Eastern ‘unreflective consciousness’ made plain that it was Europe that was ‘absolutely the end of history’ and Asia just the beginning. At its core, the Orientalist paradigm was informed by the 19th Century theories of progress where the West was seen as the telos of human development, whereas the East produced great civilization in the past but was destined to decline subsequently. This mode of presenting the Orient conveniently justified Europe’s colonial rule over the ‘inferior cultures’.

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Source: Bayat, Asef. “Neo-Orientalism,” 19 September 2015. At ISA The Futures We Want (http://futureswewant.net). Accessed 1 November 2017.

 

James G. Carrier — Orientalism as a Process

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Said's description of the process of Orientalism, the Orientalization of the Near East, focuses on the political and economic relations between the West and the Near East, and we must examine these relations if we wish to understand how the Orient that concerns him was generated in Western thought. But these relations do not exhaustively account for Orientalism. As I have already noted, Said also sees Orientalism as an instance of a fundamental process of self-definition by opposition with the alien. This process may be shaped, facilitated, and given specific content by historical factors, but is not wholly constituted by them. The basic process is simple, though its ramifications are not. Orientalist descriptions are produced by means of the juxtaposition of two opposed, essentialized entities, the West and (for lack of better terms) the Other or the Alien. Each is understood in reified, essentialist terms, and each is defined by its difference from the other element of the opposed pair.

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Source: Carrier, James G. "Occidentalism: the World Turned Upside Down." American Ethnologist 19, 2 (May 1992): 196.

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Joe Cleary — Edward Said's Influence

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By now the critiques of Orientalism constitute an entire literature of their own but the whole thrust of that work continues several decades later to be extremely fertile and productive.  In the works of a varied range of intellectuals such as Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo, Arturo Escobar, Eduard Glissant, James Blaut, Paul Gilroy, Martin Bernal, Keith Whitlam, Abdelkhebir Khatibi, Partha Chaterjee, Dipesh Charabarty, David Lloyd and man others, a concerted attempt to think beyond the normative temporal an spatial concepts that have governed established histories of modernity is now well underway.  These attempts to rethink the standard Western conceptions of modernity have different intellectual pedigrees and proceed along multiple and divergent trajectories, but the enormous catalytic contribution that Orientalism made to this task is everywhere acknowledged.” (p. 10)

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Source: Cleary, Joe, “Edward Said and the Cultural Intellectual at Century’s End.”  Irish Review 32 (2004): 1-22.

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Vittorio Cotesta — Aesthetic Orientalism

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It is a feature of aesthetic orientalism to admire the Other for his difference even while imagining him as inferior. (p. 46n)

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Source: Cotesta, Vittorio. Global Society and Human Rights. Leiden; Boston : Brill, 2012.

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Stephanie Cronin

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In 1978 the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism changed forever the terms of the debate about the nature of western scholarship on the non-western world. Indeed the very words “West” and “East” were from then on irredeemably problematized. Profoundly unsettling, Said's work had a transformational impact on many academic disciplines in western Europe, the Americas and across Asia. Although drawing on older ideas and research, including critiques of western scholarship formulated in the Soviet Union, Said's book, along with Said's own public persona, came to represent and symbolize a broader rejection of existing power-political relationships between the imperial metropoles and the colonial world. A work of committed scholarship, Orientalism’s polemical style invited engagement and attracted opposition from both right and left and has, since its publication, been embraced, criticized, contested and rejected, and interpreted and re-interpreted in the light of new empirical research and theoretical refinement. There is, however, general agreement that it constitutes a founding text in the study of the politics of knowledge.

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Although the full meaning and implications of Said's work are subject to continuing evaluation and argument, certain key ideas have been recognized as fundamental. Drawing freely on Foucault's discourse theory and Gramsci's concept of hegemony, Said developed the notion of Orientalism as a style of thought based on constructed binaries of Orient and Occident, as an ideological mechanism for the self-definition of European identity through the creation of an inferior and subordinate “other,” and, most famously, “as a corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it.” Writing about the Orient, whether academic, literary or any other kind, was accordingly inextricably bound up with relationships of power in which the Occident always had the upper hand.

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Source: Cronin, Stephanie. “Introduction: Edward Said, Russian Orientalism and Soviet Iranology.” Iranian Studies 48, 5 (2015): 647-648.

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Sophie Ellman-Golan — Hidden Orientalism

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According to Said, orientalism is so deeply imbedded within occidental culture that many orientalists are unaware of its influence. Contemporary orientalism is not intentionally violent or oppressive. Its invisibility to those utilizing it is part of what makes it so dangerous.

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Source: Ellman-Golan, Sophie, "Deconstructing Discourse: Gender and Neoliberal Orientalism in the Egyptian Revolution." B.A. thesis, Barnard College, Columbia University, 2014.

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Marc de Faoite — Orientalism as a Pain in the Rear End

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"Orientalism” is a buzzword regularly lobbed at any writer who dares step beyond the pale of what the toxic pervasive atmosphere of political correctness deems culturally acceptable or appropriate.

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Source: Foite, Marc de. “Review: The Path,” 12 August 2016. At Star2.com (http://www.star2.com). Accessed 16 August 2016.

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James Fallows — Orientalism Most Simply Defined

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"Orientalism,” stripped of its academic heavy-weather framing, boils down to treating something foreign as if it is intrinsically weird, and should be held out at arm's length and marveled or tittered at rather than treated seriously.

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Source: Fallows, James. “On the Orientalism of the Prairie,” 20 August 2013. At The Atlantic (http://www.theatlantic.com). Accessed 21 July 2016.

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David Fieni — Orientalism

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If Orientalism is a style of evaluation, then the hallmark of this style is its dual function as both a descriptive and a performative discourse. In other words, the Orientalist claims made by those seeking to legitimate European colonialism (William James, Silvestre de Ssacy, Renan), German National Socialism (Ludwig Alsdorf, Paul Thieme), or American Empire (Bernard Lewis) not only mobilize their ethnolinguistic evaluations of Indians, Egyptians, Jews, or Muslims in support of power, but they also assert these descriptions as ontological truth. (p. 9)

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Source: Fieni, David. Decadent Orientalisms: The Decay of Colonial Modernity. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020.

 

Michael Fry — Scottish Orientalism

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Scots used the orient as a proving ground for their theories. Conversely, knowledge of faraway places modified their mental constructions. This fruitful exchange was a remarkable feature of the Scottish nineteenth century, and came out in some of its most significant works. ‘Orientalism’ is a good name for the whole phenomenon, because it took exotic cultures on their own terms (with what success is a different question) and because it played a vital part in fulfilling the Enlightenment’s aspirations to universality. In that case we have to think of some other name for the sort of orientalism condemned by Said, an imposition on the passive and suffering East by the hostile and intolerant West. Some Scots in the orient set themselves up as agents of such an imposition, yet it cannot in justice be said that most did so.

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Source: Fry, Michael. “’The Key to their Hearts’: Scottish Orientalism.” In Scotland and the 19th-Century World. Edited by Gerard Carruthers, David Goldie, and Alastair Renfrew, 137-157. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2012.

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Peter Gran — Orientalism & Historical Study

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In sum, orientalism obstructs historical study by explaining away change rather than explaining change. (p. 516)

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Source: Gran, Peter. “Political Economy as a Paradigm for the Study of Islamic History.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 11, 4 (July 1980): 511-526.

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R. Stephen Humphreys — Bernard Lewis & Orientalism

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By the mid-1960s, [Bernard] Lewis had begun to lay emphasis on a different role for himself, that of commentator on trends and problems in the contemporary Middle East. This was, to be sure, an interest that he had previously pursued from time to time, and contemporary concerns had always been latent in his scholarly publications for those who cared to read between the lines. The modern Middle East inspires strong feelings, and so it is not surprising that Lewis's writing on such topics as the Arab-Israeli conflict and the resurgence of militant Islam soon catapulted him into notoriety—lionized by some, excoriated by others. The opening salvo in the attack against him was fired by Edward Said in Orientalism (1978), a book which took Said, like Lewis himself, from the decent obscurity of a respected academic to the notoriety of a public intellectual. Orientalism is a polemic and means to take no prisoners; nevertheless, its general argument deserves attention, even if one rejects it in the end. If read critically and with due reserve, it compels a second look at aspects of Lewis's work that may have been taken too much for granted. 

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Source: Humphries, R. Stephen. “Bernard Lewis: An Appreciation.” Humanities 11, 3(May/June 1990): 17-20.

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Ho Fung Hung — The Orientalist Predicament

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Viewing the development of Orientalism in a long-term perspective, we find that the most fundamental fallacy of Orientalism did not lie in the presumptions about the ontological differences between East and West and the former’s inferiority. These presumptions were only held by the Orientalists belonging to the Jansenists/ Sinophobes/evolutionists lineage, whereas many other Orientalists who belonged to the Jesuits/Sinophiles/Romantics lineage did study the East in a universalist paradigm and believe that the East was superior (at least not inferior). In fact, Orientalist knowledge was most problematic in its reductionism. Given the stereotypical images of non-Western civilizations in one form or other, the Orientalists were confined to the choices between uncritical admiration and unreserved contempt. The only way of overcoming the Orientalist predicament is to examine the non-Western civilizations in their full complexity, heterogeneity, and dynamism. Not only is this indispensable to the transcendence of both racist bias and naive idealization of the East, but it is also a critical step toward the advancement of the comparative-historical sociology of world-civilizations. (p. 276).

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Source: Hung, Ho-Fung. (2003) “Orientalist Knowledge and Social Theories: China and the European Conceptions of East-West Differences from 1600 to 1900.” Sociological Theory 21, 3 (September 2003): 254
-280.

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Benjamin Isakhan — Orientalism as an Ideological Fantasy

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It is now more than 30 years since the publication of Edward W. Said’s seminal text Orientalism. With his discourse analysis of an astounding number of academic, bureaucratic and literary texts from the colonial period, Said was able to demonstrate that the western colonial project was premised on a matrix of interdependent discourses, institutions and practices, which he termed ‘orientalism’. The net output of such orientalism was an ideological fantasy, a fantasy that bore no relation to the reality and complexity of non-european society with its myriad cultures, religions, peoples, customs and histories. Instead, orientalism has served to homogenize, demonize and stereotype the non-european world according to fairly reductive and negative terms, so that the oriental was viewed as the ‘other’. Clearly the unquestioned tendency to view the people of the orient as deficient and inferior ‘others’ served the colonial agenda of continuing to dominate and control sections of the East.

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Source: Isakhan, Benjamin. “Review Essay: Military Orientalism and the Occupation of Iraq.” International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies 4, 1-2 (2010): 211-215.

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Helen Jun — Nineteenth-Century American Orientalism

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Broadly then, we can understand nineteenth-century American Orientalism as a set of discursive formations that are determined by and determining of U.S. economic and political engagements with East Asia and the Pacific, and that provide the ideological structure for domestic processes that produce and manage Asian racial difference within the United States. These processes, which involve “instances” of Asian incorporation (as circus exhibits, as coolie labor, as U.S. colony) and “instances” of Asian exclusion (from immigration, citizenship, and U.S. national culture), are definitive of an American genealogy of Asian racialization that variously produces the Oriental as alien to the United States.

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Source: Jun, Helen H., “Black Orientalism: Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Race and U.S. Citizenship.” American Quarterly 58, 4 (December 2006): 1049

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Ivan Davidson Kalmar — Orientalism & Christianity

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Orientalism was ambivalent: in some ways it feared or condemned the Orient and in others it loved and romanticized it. (This was clear to Said but was lost on some of his followers.) Consequently, the western Christian attitude not only to the Jews but to the Muslims and Arabs and to the Orient was always expressed in a complex variety of emotional modes. It is what one should expect, since the Orient is where the West’s founding religion, Christianity, has its roots. In western Christian history orientalism is more the Mother than the Other. (p. 137)

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Source: Kalmar, Ivan Davidson. "Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: The Formation of a Secret." Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 7, 2 (2009): 135-143.

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Razib Khan — Orientalism Most Simply Defined (Again)

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Though there is a technical meaning for Orientalism, the reality is that it just refers to a whole class of instances where Westerners co-opt, characterize, or utilize, non-Western motifs and cultures.

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Source: Khan, Razib. “An Orientalist Fantasy,” 25 May 2012. At Gene Expression (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/). Accessed 28 July 2018.

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Irfan Khawaja — Defining Orientalism

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As the term is currently used in post-colonial and area studies, “Orientalism” is an academic neologism coined to denote the distinctive form of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotry endemic to the West. This controversial and revisionist coinage comes from Edward Said’s 1978 book, Orientalism, which describes Orientalism as “a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient,” and “a system of representations framed by a whole set of forces that brought the Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness and later, Western empire.” For our purposes, we can narrow Said’s thesis to three claims: that there is such a phenomenon as Orientalism; that it’s morally reprehensible; and that it has been expressed with reprehensible consequences in the history of Western imperialism.

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Source: Khawaja, Irfan. “Muslim Anti-Semitism and Zionist Orientalism: The Workings of a Vicious Cycle,” n.d. At Google.com (https://www.google.com/). Accessed 25 June 2016.

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Aziza Khazzoom — Orientalism in Opposition to the Occident

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Orientalism, for Said, is a system of thought that first posits an opposition between Occident and Orient and then builds on the opposition to construct the orient as inferior, to "dominate it, restructure it, and have authority over it.” The process of orientalisation is relational not simply because one category implies another but because constructing the east is how the west produces itself. It is the fact that one group has the ability to classify another that makes orientalisation an exercise of power, and this form of power is linked to the monopolization of resources and group conflict in several ways (also see Said 1993).”

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Source: Aziza Khazzoom, “The Great Chain of Orientalism: Jewish Identity, Stigma Management, and Ethnic Exclusion in Israel.” American Sociological Review 68 (2003), p. 483.

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Gudrun Krämer — Orientalism & Islam

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Orientalism, as we have learned, is a project that presents, or as many would say ‘constructs’ or ‘represents’, Islam as a distinct, homogeneous and timeless entity that is essentially defined by its normative texts, i.e. the Qur’an as divine word and the Sunna, or tradition of the Prophet Muhammad. For the unreformed orientalist, Muslims are sufficiently defined by their being Muslim. Little does it matter whether they live in Kuala Lumpur, Cairo or Karachi. They are over-determined by Islam. This is, of course, vintage culturalism. But orientalism, its critics continue, does not stop here: it ‘constructs’ Islam as the ultimate Other, using it as a negative foil against which the achievements of Western civilization, resting on the triple foundation of ancient Judaism, ancient Greece and the Christian faith, appear all the more glorious. Islam, by contrast, lacks the notion of liberty, a sense of responsibility both individual and civic, a spirit of scientific inquiry, an independent middle class, any kind of recognized community except the umma, etc., etc. If one adopts this logic, Islam is little but a ‘cluster of absences’ (Bryan S. Turner, who, to avoid any misunderstanding, does not share this view).

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Source: Gudren Krämer, “On Difference and Understanding: The Use and Abuse of the Study of Islam.” ISIM Newsletter 5 (2000): 6-7.

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H. Hale Künüçen & Senem Güngör — Orientalism

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Orientalism seems to be the supreme context for interpretations and interactions of Oriental people. Orientalism as cultural myth had been articulated through metaphors which characterize the East in ways which emphasize its strangeness and Otherness. This kind of Orientalism carries with it the implication that Oriental people are inferior and weak. Social and cognitive psychology determines that stereotyping is a kind of mental schema composing a design to help people absorb the reality; in other words to make things more understandable and less threatening. These mental schema, such as stereotypes, provide people with the illusion of understanding by dividing up and categorizing the flux of experience into easily manageable cognitive maps (Augustinos, 1995:33).

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Source: Künüçen, H. Hale and Senem Güngör. “’300’ and the Other.” 183-196,” 2008. At Andalu Úniversitesi (http://cim.anadolu.edu.tr). Accessed 10 July 2016.

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Lamont Lindstrom — Orientalism & Occidentalism

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Orientalism produces the Orient but also reveals and is a commentary on Occidental institutions, styles, and interests. The Orient, and Orientalism, necessarily presumes an Occident and a parallel if sometimes less clearly spoken discourse of Occidentalism.

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Source: Lindstrom, Lamont. “Cargoism and Occidentalism.” In Occidentalism: Images of the West. Edited by James G. Carrier, 33-60. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.

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Richard C. Martin — Said's Impact on Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies

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A single book changed the meta-discourse on what we were doing and what we should be doing. (p. 903)

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Source: Martin, Richard C. (2010). ”Islamic Studies in the American Academy: A Personal Reflection.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 78 (2010): 896–920.

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Joseph Massad — The Impact of Orientalism

 

Has Orientalism, which is admittedly both theory and criticism, in traveling across time, left its conditions of production and the normative values of its immediate environment to another time, with its own power relations and normative values?  It seems to me that this would indeed be the case were it not for a crucial difference—namely that the conditions and normative values that governed the writing and publication of Orientalism in 1978 have changed very little, except in certain corridors of the academy…Although the academic value of Orientalism and recognition of Said have appreciated considerably since 1978, so has the Orientalism to which Said applied his analytical gaze.” (p. 28)

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Source: Massad, Joseph, “Affiliating with Edward Said.”  In Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation.  Edited by Adel Iskandar and Hakem Rustom, 23-49.  Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2010.

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Ilhan C. Ozen & Sean M. Zeigler — Said's Impact on Orientalism

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Simply by authoring a book challenging the basic tenets of Orientalism, by competing with the Orientalist discourse on an equal intellectual plane in an esteemed Western university, by exposing the mystifications and power games that were the essence of Orientalist science, Said rejected the Orientalist discourse not only in theory but also in practice. By refusing to be tied down, by refusing to be silenced, by showing that an Oriental subject could have its independent voice in the academic universe, Said was falsifying the main assumptions of the Orientalist ideology.” (p. 311)

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Source: Ozen, Ilhan C. and Sean M. Zeigler, “Translating Khan on Singer: Global Solvent Versus Local Interpretation.” The Pakistan Development Review 45, 2 (Summer 2006): 303-314.

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Dru Pagliassotti, — Orientalism & Ideology

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…nothing in human language is innocent of ideology.

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Source: Pagliassotti, Dru. “Against VictOrientalism,” 10 March 2010. At Dru Pagliassotti: The Mark of Ashen Wings (http://drupagliassotti.com). Accessed 28 December 2018.

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Gísli Pálsson – Environmental Orientalism

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The vocabulary of orientalism is typically one of domestication, frontiers, and expansion—of exploring, conquering, and exploiting the environment—for the diverse purposes of production, consumption, sport, and display. To the extent that one can speak of environmental ‘management’ in this context, management is simply a technical enterprise, the rational application of Baconian science and mathematical equations to the natural world. This typically suggests a lofty stance with respect to the ‘object in question’. In the orientalist context, scientists present themselves as analysts of the material world, unaffected by any ethical considerations. This implies a radical distinction between laypersons and experts, another theoretical construct rooted in the innovations of the Renaissance.” (p. 68)

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Source: Pálsson, Gísli. “Human-Environmental Relations: Orientalism, Paternalism and Communalism.” In Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives. Edited by Philippe Descola and Gísli Pálsson, 63-81. London and New York: Routledge, 1996.

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Mahala Ruddell – Orientalism as Information Sharing

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“Orientalism” is not just pictures of Turkish girls in a sultan’s harem; it is a process of information sharing through art, literature, military campaigns, and politics. (p. 7)

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Source: Ruddell, Mahala. “Strangers in Their Own Native Land: Joseph Smith, Mormons, and the Orientalizating of an American People” (M.A. thesis, University of New Hampshire, 2013).

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Edward W. Said – Defining Orientalism

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It will be clear to the reader (and will become clearer still throughout the many pages that follow) that by Orientalism I mean several things, all of them, in my opinion, interdependent. [1] The most readily accepted designation for Orientalism is an academic one, and indeed the label still serves in a number of academic institutions. Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient—and this applies whether the person is an anthropologist, sociologist, historian, or philologist—either in its specific or its general aspects, is an Orientalist, and what he or she does is Orientalism… [2] Related to this academic tradition, whose fortunes, transmigrations, specializations, and transmissions are in part the subject of his study, is a more general meaning for Orientalism. Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between "the Orient" and (most of the time) "the Occident."… The interchange between the academic and the more or less imaginative meanings of Orientalism is a constant one, and since the late eighteenth century there has been a considerable, quite disciplined—perhaps even regulated—traffic between the two.  [3] Here
 I come to the third meaning of Orientalism, which is something more historically and materially defined than either of the other two. Taking the late eighteenth century as a very roughly defined starting point Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it 
by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient. (pp. 2-3)

 

Cultural strength is not something we can discuss very easily— and one of the purposes of the present work is to illustrate, analyze, and reflect upon Orientalism as an exercise of cultural strength. In other words, it is better not to risk generalizations about so vague and yet so important a notion as cultural strength until a good deal of material has been analyzed first. But at the outset one can say that so far as the West was concerned during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an assumption had been made that the Orient and everything in it was, if not patently inferior to, then in need of corrective study by the West. The Orient was viewed as if framed by the classroom, the criminal court, the prison, the illustrated manual. Orientalism, then, is knowledge of the Orient that places things Oriental in class, court, prison, or manual for scrutiny, study, judgment, discipline, or governing. (pp. 40-41)

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The result for Orientalism has been a sort of consensus: certain things, certain types of statement, certain types of work have seemed for the Orientalist correct. He has built his work and research upon them, and they in turn have pressed hard upon new writers and scholars. Orientalism can thus be regarded as a manner of regularized (or Orientalized) writing, vision, and study, dominated by imperatives, perspectives, and ideological biases ostensibly suited to the Orient. The Orient is taught, researched, administered, and pronounced upon in certain discrete ways. (p. 202)

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My contention is that Orientalism is fundamentally a political doctrine willed over the Orient because the Orient was weaker than the West, which elided the Orient's difference with its weakness. (p. 204)

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As a cultural apparatus Orientalism is all aggression, activity, judgment, will-to-truth, and knowledge. The Orient existed for the West, or so it seemed to countless Orientalists, whose attitude to what they worked on was either paternalistic or candidly condescending—unless, of course, they were antiquarians, in which case the "classical" Orient was a credit to them and not to the lamentable modern Orient. (p. 204)

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Nowhere do I argue that Orientalism is evil, or sloppy, or uniformly the same in the work of each and every Orientalist. But I do say that the guild of Orientalists has a specific history of complicity with imperial power, which it would be Panglossian to call irrelevant. (p. 342)

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Source: Said, Edward W. Orientalism. London and New York: Penguin Books, 2003.

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Ziauddin Sardar — Orientalism

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There is nothing about Orientalism that is neutral or objective.  By definition it is a partial and partisan subject.  No one comes to the subject without a background and baggage. (p. vii)

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The history of Orientalism shows it is not an outward gaze of the West toward a fixed, definite object that is to the east, the Orient. Orientalism is a form of inward reflection, preoccupied with the intellectual concerns, problems, fears and desires of the West that are visited on a fabulated, constructed object by convention called the Orient. What that Orient is, is a shifting, ambiguous compendium, a thing that identifies whatever the writer, inscriber or supposed observer wishes it to mean or be at the moment. (p. 13)

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Source: Sardar, Ziauddin. Orientalism. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Open University Press, 1999.

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David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye — Orientalism and the Other

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With the appearance of Said’s eponymous book in 1978, Orientalism assumed a pejorative sense. No longer the effete pursuit of some doddering dons or an artistic interest in the exotic, it began to be seen as an important weapon in the armory of Western imperialism, an intellectual tool for ensuring the West’s dominion over the East. In a nutshell, Said’s Orientalism argues that the scholarly apparatus whereby the West studies the East is a means to oppress it. Occidentals do this by thinking about the Orient as “the Other,” a mysterious, feminized, malevolent, and dangerous “cultural contestant.” (p. 5)

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Source: Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, David. Russian Orientalism: Asia in the Russian Mind from Peter the Great to the Emigration. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2010.

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Malini Johar Schueller — Said's Contribution

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The major contribution of Said's Orientalism was to make it impossible to think about Western constructions of the Oriental in purely spiritual, philosophical, or symbolic terms and, by analogy, to make it problematic to deal with a construction of an Other without thinking about relations of power. To simply ignore such relations and questions of hegemony is, as Ella Shohat has suggested, to "sanctify the fait accompli of colonial violence." (p. 6)

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Source: Schueller, Malini Johar. U.S. Orientalisms: Race, Nation, and Gender in Literature, 1790-1890. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1998.

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Derek B. Scott — Musical Orientalism

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In spite of the differences that developed over the years in Western representations of the East in music, successive Orientalist styles tended to relate to previous Orientalist styles more closely than they did to Eastern ethnic practices. It is not surprising, because Orientalist music is not a poor imitation of another cultural practice: its purpose is not to imitate but to represent. (pp. 10-11)

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Source: Scott, Derek B. Musical Style and Social Meaning: Selected Essays. London and New York: Routledge, 2010.

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Algis Uždavinys — Defining Orientalism

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The term “Orientalism” itself first appeared in the third decade of the 19th century in France and usually it referred to the European attitudes towards the Middle Eastern cultures. By extension, it covers the range of attitudes to all traditional and philosophical ideas of Asian countries. While used in many different senses, the word “Orientalism” as a neutral descriptive term may simply mean the scholarly studies of the languages and texts of the Orient. However, it is also related to the East India Company’s policies aimed at the preservation of Indian culture, to the fabulous and romantic artistic style associated with the imagined Eastern luxuries and liberties (so attractive to the puritan Victorian mentality) and, more recently, to a discourse of power fashioned by the Western imperialism …all scholarly discourses of Orientalism partially depend on a particular hermeneutical perspective and highly selective creative imagination."

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Source: Algis Uždavinys, "Sufism in the Light of Orientalism." Acta Orientalia Vilnensia 6, (2005): pp. 118, 124.

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John Timothy Wixted — He Forces Us to Think

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Edward Said has performed a service by making those of us who might be called “Orientalists” reflect on what we are doing, prompting us to question the unconscious assumptions or attitudes we may bring to our work.

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Source: John Timothy Wixted, “Reverse Orientalism.” Sino-Japanese Studies 2 (1989), p. 26.

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