Orientalism

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Overview

Orientalism (1978) by Edward Said argues that European and American scholarship, literature and policy about the Middle East and wider Asia did not simply describe the East but helped create it as an object: exotic, unchanging and inferior, in contrast to a rational, progressive West. Said links this system of images to the practice of imperial rule. The book is a foundation of postcolonial studies and a useful warning about how stereotypes are produced by institutions and repeated as expertise.

Context

Said was a Palestinian-American literary critic at Columbia University. He wrote after the 1967 war and during the Lebanese conflict, as Western media reported the Arab world largely through fixed images. He drew on Michel Foucault's idea of discourse and Antonio Gramsci's idea of cultural hegemony, applied to a long record of European writing about the East.