Orientalism Themes

Edward Said’s Orientalism explores the ways in which the West (broadly speaking, Northern Europe and eventually America) talk about and relate to the Orient—which mainly stands for modern-day Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt. Positioning Orientalism as a uniquely powerful discourse because of the ways in which it has both been fed by and used to feed European colonial ambitions, Said spends much of his book articulating Orientalism’s basic tenets and tracking them…

Because the lands that comprise it are situated close to and have been in almost constant geopolitical and economic contact with Europe since the bronze age Trojan War, the concept of the Orient has a long and rich history in the Western imagination. Although this relationship has sometimes been characterized by a more reciprocal balance of power, Europe eventually gained a stable upper hand in the 18th and 19th centuries. Edward Said sees Orientalist discourse…

As Edward Said traces the cultural continuity of Orientalist discourse from the 8th century BCE in The Iliad to opinion pieces authored by American statesman Henry Kissinger within a few years of Orientalism’s publication, it becomes clear that Orientalism is based on racist depictions of Oriental subjects, particularly Semitic ones. Orientalism casts these people as menacing and dangerous, backward, tribal, simple-minded, and incapable of rational thought, and other harmful things. As Said traces…

The way that discourses shape reality and the relationship of knowledge and power—ideas that Edward Said explores at length in Orientalism—suggest that no one can have a purely disinterested view of their own culture or anyone else’s. Anticipating this critique of his work, Said takes pains to emphasize that the problem with Orientalism isn’t that scholars, policymakers, and ordinary citizens are caught up in cultural and geopolitical webs of influence. Issues arise, instead, when…