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Available
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Publication
New York : Vintage Books, [2003]
Description
More than three decades after its first publication, Edward Said's groundbreaking critique of the West's historical, cultural, and political perceptions of the East has become a modern classic. In this wide-ranging, intellectually vigorous study, Said traces the origins of "orientalism" to the centuries-long period during which Europe dominated the Middle and Near East and, from its position of power, defined "the orient" simply as "other than" the occident. This entrenched view continues to dominate western ideas and, because it does not allow the East to represent itself, prevents true understanding. Essential, and still eye-opening, Orientalism remains one of the most important books written about our divided world.
User reviews
LibraryThing member sjstuckey
Said argues that a "colonial mentality" has been institutionalized in the academic study of the Middle East and Islam, and subsequently has severely biased Middle Eastern foreign policy actions by the US, Britain and France. This backward mindset, Said argues, results in gross generalizations
Said's prose is pretentious and convoluted, and his rigid writing style gives the book the feel of a long term paper. The author sets forth his main argument within the first several pages, and the subsequent 300+ pages outline his supporting examples. As the book was written in the 1970's, and Said uses examples primarily from the 18th, 19th and early 20th Centuries, his argument ultimately fails to strike home and lacks relevance in today's society. He does, however, score some points against current "Orientalists" such as Bernard Lewis (which is very relevant today due to Lewis' impact on the Middle Eastern foreign policy and decision to go to war in Iraq during the Bush Administration). This fact reminds the reader that while the argument is less relevant today, the Orientalist mentality has not completely disappeared.
Said uses a caustic and condescending tone throughout the book, and many of his attacks are personal, and serve to both undermine the strength of his arguments, and to demean the author himself.
Overall, if one is a serious student of the Middle East and Islam, this book does provide one with valuable perspective on biases that may exist in other sources of information, both written and oral. However, for the casual reader, the book will be a difficult slog.
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about, and the dehumanization of, the Muslim by Western powers.Said's prose is pretentious and convoluted, and his rigid writing style gives the book the feel of a long term paper. The author sets forth his main argument within the first several pages, and the subsequent 300+ pages outline his supporting examples. As the book was written in the 1970's, and Said uses examples primarily from the 18th, 19th and early 20th Centuries, his argument ultimately fails to strike home and lacks relevance in today's society. He does, however, score some points against current "Orientalists" such as Bernard Lewis (which is very relevant today due to Lewis' impact on the Middle Eastern foreign policy and decision to go to war in Iraq during the Bush Administration). This fact reminds the reader that while the argument is less relevant today, the Orientalist mentality has not completely disappeared.
Said uses a caustic and condescending tone throughout the book, and many of his attacks are personal, and serve to both undermine the strength of his arguments, and to demean the author himself.
Overall, if one is a serious student of the Middle East and Islam, this book does provide one with valuable perspective on biases that may exist in other sources of information, both written and oral. However, for the casual reader, the book will be a difficult slog.
Show Less
LibraryThing member magonistarevolt
Let me start off by saying that this is a vitally important book. This is not to say that I consistently enjoyed reading it, but that I understand the importance of the book to the world. I should have rated it higher if the review was related to the importance of the book to society. But instead,
This book is for academics, and it is about the academy. It is assumed you know the names Flaubert, Renan, Dante, Schwab, Nerval, Goethe, etc, and can appreciate their works. The lessons are of course valid and extrapolatable to outside of the academy, however, the book relies fairly heavily on referencing these authors. This is of course natural. In addition to being a seminal work of postcolonialism, it is also a comparative literature book. The rating that I gave is due to my immense enjoyment of the former aspects and my ignorance of and indifference to the latter.
It is also assumed that you speak English (naturally) but also French and German. There are untranslated passages- sometimes mere sentences, sometimes several paragraphs- in the aforementioned languages. Had I read the book, rather than listened to it, I would have skipped over these sections. But since it was an audiobook, I just waited them out.
Orientalism is about how colonialism creates archetypes for entire swaths of unrelated peoples, and the political consequences of thinking this way. This has been done for hundreds of years, but it has much more dire political consequences in the age of unmanned Predator drones and resource wars. "This system now culminates in the very institutions of the state. To write about the Arab Oriental world, therefore is to write [...] with the unquestioned certainty of absolute truth backed by absolute force." Orientalism is an example of colonialist mindset. It "calls in question not only the possibility of nonpolitical scholarship, but also the advisability of too close a relationship between the scholar and the state."
The Arab Mind, Oriental despotism, Arabic sensuality, sloth, fatalism, cruelty, degradation and splendor, all of these are Orientalist myths that persist to this day, and shape how we have constructed this other, as a result of colonialism. Colonialism created a need to hate this enormous swath of humanity in order that they could be colonized without guilty conscience. In so doing, "Orientalism failed to identify with human experience, failed also to see it as human experience."
This colonialist mindset had incredibly serious consequences in shaping not only the attitude of the "West" towards the "East," but how the people who make up the "West" concieve themselves, and how they construct their own identities. "Debates today about Frenchness and Englishness in France and Britain respectively, or about Islam in countries like Egypt and Pakistan are part of the same interpretive process, which involves the identities of different others, whether they be outsiders and refugees or apostates and infidels. It should be obvious in all cases that these processes are not mental excersizes but urgent social contests, involving such concrete political issues as immigration laws, the legislation of personal condict, the constitution of orthodoxy, the legitimization of violence and/or insurrection, the character and content of education, and the direction of foreign policy, which very often has to do with the designation of official enemies. In short the construction of identity is bound up with the disposition of power and powerlessness in each society, and is therefore anything but mere academic wool-gathering."
Though it was not the purpose of the book, it also provided me some clarity on other, related subjects, such as Liberalism, and modern anti-Semitism.
Liberalism that accomodates Orientalism (soft Orientalism) is torn to shreds by Said, and in the process he exposes one of the most insipid weaknesses of Liberalism: the illusion of the independence of different thought structures of politics, economy, kinship and culture. A liberal scholar points to Islam's supposed totality (that it encompasses a culture, a religion, an economy, a politics, etc subordinated to one school of thought: Islam), and reveals the weakness in his own. These things are not only interdependent, but to consider them to be apart is foolishness. Consider capitalism, our current mode: can we honestly say that any deviation from the needs of capital are significant enough to render politics a separate sphere? How about culture? All of these things are contained within the totality of capitalism, because that is what capital demands. Liberalism insists on these things being separate because it is weak and wants to misdirect struggle away from the root of the problem. (And so, incidentally, how silly does it make the Liberals of the "ParEcon" gospel sound, when they want ParEcon, but also ParPolity, ParKin (??), etc?)
(Disclaimer, the author of this review is Jewish) Anti-Semitism seems largely to have disappeared as a major ideological motivation in the postmodern world. Or has it? Edward Said brings up some compelling evidence that the whitening of the people Israel (Jews inside and outside of the nationstate which shares its name) has merely shifted much of the Anti-Semitism to the Arabs, who are, after all, also Semitic. "By a concatonation of events and circumstances, the Semitic myth bifurcated in the Zionist movement. One Semite went the way of Orientalism. The other, the Arab, was forced to go the way of the Oriental." Jews by assimilating and accepting the wages of whiteness sidestepped their own identification as Semites, but the Semitic stereotype is kept alive in the depictions of Arabs. "[After 1973, c]artoons depicting an Arab sheik standing behind a gasoline pump turned up consistantly. These Arabs, however, were clearly Semitic. Their sharply-hooked noses, the evil mustachioed leer on their faces, were obvious reminders, to a largely non-Semitic population, that Semites were at the bottom of all our troubles, which in this case was principally a gasoline shortage. The transference of a popular anti-Semitic animus from a Jewish to an Arab target was made smoothly, since the figure was essentially the same."
This took a slight of hand from Jews as well, who strongly identified with the oppressors of the Arabs since the founding of Israel. Said describes a Jewish Orientalist named Bernard Lewis who describes an anti-imperialist riot against Israel in Cairo as "anti-Jewish." "Yet, in neither instance does he tell us how it was anti-Jewish. In fact, as his material evidence for anti-Jewishness, he produces the somewhat surprising intelligence that several churches, Catholic, Armenian and Greek Orthodox were attacked and damaged." Finally, one can glean from the text that this escape from oppression is no escape at all. As Proust reminds us, when a Jew appears in aristocratic society, he is still a Jew: "The Romanians, the Egyptians, the Turks, may hate the Jews. But in a French drawing room, the differences between those people are not so apparent. And an Israelite making his entry as if he were from the heart of the desert, his body crouching like a hyenas, his neck stretched obliquely forward, spreading himself in proud "Salaam"s completely satisfies a certain taste for the Oriental."
The Afterword that Said includes is a true gift. There are a dozen amazing quotations I could pull from it, describing accurately our current situation, and the impact that his work has had in it, and the confusing situation we live under in these times. It was a fitting end to a challenging book.
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I rated it based on my experience of it. The book is insightful and hardhitting. It is rigorous and brilliant. It is not, however, accessible.This book is for academics, and it is about the academy. It is assumed you know the names Flaubert, Renan, Dante, Schwab, Nerval, Goethe, etc, and can appreciate their works. The lessons are of course valid and extrapolatable to outside of the academy, however, the book relies fairly heavily on referencing these authors. This is of course natural. In addition to being a seminal work of postcolonialism, it is also a comparative literature book. The rating that I gave is due to my immense enjoyment of the former aspects and my ignorance of and indifference to the latter.
It is also assumed that you speak English (naturally) but also French and German. There are untranslated passages- sometimes mere sentences, sometimes several paragraphs- in the aforementioned languages. Had I read the book, rather than listened to it, I would have skipped over these sections. But since it was an audiobook, I just waited them out.
Orientalism is about how colonialism creates archetypes for entire swaths of unrelated peoples, and the political consequences of thinking this way. This has been done for hundreds of years, but it has much more dire political consequences in the age of unmanned Predator drones and resource wars. "This system now culminates in the very institutions of the state. To write about the Arab Oriental world, therefore is to write [...] with the unquestioned certainty of absolute truth backed by absolute force." Orientalism is an example of colonialist mindset. It "calls in question not only the possibility of nonpolitical scholarship, but also the advisability of too close a relationship between the scholar and the state."
The Arab Mind, Oriental despotism, Arabic sensuality, sloth, fatalism, cruelty, degradation and splendor, all of these are Orientalist myths that persist to this day, and shape how we have constructed this other, as a result of colonialism. Colonialism created a need to hate this enormous swath of humanity in order that they could be colonized without guilty conscience. In so doing, "Orientalism failed to identify with human experience, failed also to see it as human experience."
This colonialist mindset had incredibly serious consequences in shaping not only the attitude of the "West" towards the "East," but how the people who make up the "West" concieve themselves, and how they construct their own identities. "Debates today about Frenchness and Englishness in France and Britain respectively, or about Islam in countries like Egypt and Pakistan are part of the same interpretive process, which involves the identities of different others, whether they be outsiders and refugees or apostates and infidels. It should be obvious in all cases that these processes are not mental excersizes but urgent social contests, involving such concrete political issues as immigration laws, the legislation of personal condict, the constitution of orthodoxy, the legitimization of violence and/or insurrection, the character and content of education, and the direction of foreign policy, which very often has to do with the designation of official enemies. In short the construction of identity is bound up with the disposition of power and powerlessness in each society, and is therefore anything but mere academic wool-gathering."
Though it was not the purpose of the book, it also provided me some clarity on other, related subjects, such as Liberalism, and modern anti-Semitism.
Liberalism that accomodates Orientalism (soft Orientalism) is torn to shreds by Said, and in the process he exposes one of the most insipid weaknesses of Liberalism: the illusion of the independence of different thought structures of politics, economy, kinship and culture. A liberal scholar points to Islam's supposed totality (that it encompasses a culture, a religion, an economy, a politics, etc subordinated to one school of thought: Islam), and reveals the weakness in his own. These things are not only interdependent, but to consider them to be apart is foolishness. Consider capitalism, our current mode: can we honestly say that any deviation from the needs of capital are significant enough to render politics a separate sphere? How about culture? All of these things are contained within the totality of capitalism, because that is what capital demands. Liberalism insists on these things being separate because it is weak and wants to misdirect struggle away from the root of the problem. (And so, incidentally, how silly does it make the Liberals of the "ParEcon" gospel sound, when they want ParEcon, but also ParPolity, ParKin (??), etc?)
(Disclaimer, the author of this review is Jewish) Anti-Semitism seems largely to have disappeared as a major ideological motivation in the postmodern world. Or has it? Edward Said brings up some compelling evidence that the whitening of the people Israel (Jews inside and outside of the nationstate which shares its name) has merely shifted much of the Anti-Semitism to the Arabs, who are, after all, also Semitic. "By a concatonation of events and circumstances, the Semitic myth bifurcated in the Zionist movement. One Semite went the way of Orientalism. The other, the Arab, was forced to go the way of the Oriental." Jews by assimilating and accepting the wages of whiteness sidestepped their own identification as Semites, but the Semitic stereotype is kept alive in the depictions of Arabs. "[After 1973, c]artoons depicting an Arab sheik standing behind a gasoline pump turned up consistantly. These Arabs, however, were clearly Semitic. Their sharply-hooked noses, the evil mustachioed leer on their faces, were obvious reminders, to a largely non-Semitic population, that Semites were at the bottom of all our troubles, which in this case was principally a gasoline shortage. The transference of a popular anti-Semitic animus from a Jewish to an Arab target was made smoothly, since the figure was essentially the same."
This took a slight of hand from Jews as well, who strongly identified with the oppressors of the Arabs since the founding of Israel. Said describes a Jewish Orientalist named Bernard Lewis who describes an anti-imperialist riot against Israel in Cairo as "anti-Jewish." "Yet, in neither instance does he tell us how it was anti-Jewish. In fact, as his material evidence for anti-Jewishness, he produces the somewhat surprising intelligence that several churches, Catholic, Armenian and Greek Orthodox were attacked and damaged." Finally, one can glean from the text that this escape from oppression is no escape at all. As Proust reminds us, when a Jew appears in aristocratic society, he is still a Jew: "The Romanians, the Egyptians, the Turks, may hate the Jews. But in a French drawing room, the differences between those people are not so apparent. And an Israelite making his entry as if he were from the heart of the desert, his body crouching like a hyenas, his neck stretched obliquely forward, spreading himself in proud "Salaam"s completely satisfies a certain taste for the Oriental."
The Afterword that Said includes is a true gift. There are a dozen amazing quotations I could pull from it, describing accurately our current situation, and the impact that his work has had in it, and the confusing situation we live under in these times. It was a fitting end to a challenging book.
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LibraryThing member gregorybrown
Reading Orientalism was sorta inevitable, as it cast such a long shadow over the social sciences in the 35 years since its writing. The subject sounds kinda baroque and obscure: how the West defined the Orient as a separate and opposite mirror to itself, the "Occident". But to his credit, Said
But Said's specific case also doubles to demonstrate one of his larger points, a big ambitious idea that becomes inarguable by the end. The trite quip about how the observer affects the observer is true—that culture, studies, and texts are used as tools of power, and often as an extension of efforts to subjegate the studied.
Now a weaker version of this hypothesis is pretty common-sense; we all know about explicitly political works, didactic fables, and the like. In a mildly more subtle fashion, we can also point to marxist/feminist/etc. readings of texts that expose the hidden assumptions, or we can recognize that culture was often funded towards explicitly political goals, such as the CIA funding the arts to demonstrate American superiority during the Cold War.
But even the academy was—and still is—infected by this same problem. Sciences were born under the assumption that we had to study and define cultures because the natives couldn't handle it themselves. Or even worse, we defined those cultures in our own minds *without* consulting the native peoples, as their input would surely complicate any self-satisfied narrative. Archeology was one tool, for sure, but it extended to where most of the "canonical" works that chronicle Asian, African, or South American cultures are actually written by outsiders.
In essence, Said is arguing for the importance of post-colonial fiction, a field that only started to cohere after he wrote *Orientalism*. More widely, it's a call to read more works in translation, to learn about cultures through the way they know themselves.
Now what I've typed so far makes the book sound great, right? But while Said's book starts out strong—explicating his thesis and making a case for its importance—after the first 100 pages it rapidly gets lost in the weeds. The problem is partially a function of his thesis, arguing that Westerners fell pray to useful simplifications that ignored the actual reality of the people in the "Orient". So to avoid biting that critique himself, Said needs to provide those very details to support his thesis. He can't afford to be too sweeping, since that's what he's warning against!
But the writing style, and the detail of the source exegesis, makes me think that the bigger obstacle is that Said's book was aimed at an academic audience. It's possible to be scholarly yet narrative, and there are any number of works that accomplish both. (My personal favorite: Caro's work on LBJ, which both tells an epic story and is supported by a mountain of original research.) But to put it frankly, Said's work falls flat after the first section, cataloguing endless previous works and name-dropping the hell out of scholars and gentlemen-adventurers who helped form the field of oriental studies.
In the end, I could only stand about 100 pages of the close-readings, eventually skipping large chunks in the hope that something—anything—would be worthwhile in the rest of the book. And to my dismay, there really wasn't. I should have been cautious due to Said's early-and-often asshole move of quoting French sources without providing any sort of translation, but quickly learned my lesson in trudging through the rest.
In the end, Said's book constitutes a lovely forest, yet gets lost in telling us all about every single one of the trees. There's material out there for a great and fascinating book, chronicling how the assumptions continued to be expressed in "reputable" works of the present; it just isn't this one.
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pursues his thesis well, teasing apart the historical lineage of oriental studies, especially in Napoleon's invasion of Egypt, the crossroads between the Orient and the West. For sure, Said's book was a large part of why you never really hear about "Oriental Studies" today at the university level.But Said's specific case also doubles to demonstrate one of his larger points, a big ambitious idea that becomes inarguable by the end. The trite quip about how the observer affects the observer is true—that culture, studies, and texts are used as tools of power, and often as an extension of efforts to subjegate the studied.
Now a weaker version of this hypothesis is pretty common-sense; we all know about explicitly political works, didactic fables, and the like. In a mildly more subtle fashion, we can also point to marxist/feminist/etc. readings of texts that expose the hidden assumptions, or we can recognize that culture was often funded towards explicitly political goals, such as the CIA funding the arts to demonstrate American superiority during the Cold War.
But even the academy was—and still is—infected by this same problem. Sciences were born under the assumption that we had to study and define cultures because the natives couldn't handle it themselves. Or even worse, we defined those cultures in our own minds *without* consulting the native peoples, as their input would surely complicate any self-satisfied narrative. Archeology was one tool, for sure, but it extended to where most of the "canonical" works that chronicle Asian, African, or South American cultures are actually written by outsiders.
In essence, Said is arguing for the importance of post-colonial fiction, a field that only started to cohere after he wrote *Orientalism*. More widely, it's a call to read more works in translation, to learn about cultures through the way they know themselves.
Now what I've typed so far makes the book sound great, right? But while Said's book starts out strong—explicating his thesis and making a case for its importance—after the first 100 pages it rapidly gets lost in the weeds. The problem is partially a function of his thesis, arguing that Westerners fell pray to useful simplifications that ignored the actual reality of the people in the "Orient". So to avoid biting that critique himself, Said needs to provide those very details to support his thesis. He can't afford to be too sweeping, since that's what he's warning against!
But the writing style, and the detail of the source exegesis, makes me think that the bigger obstacle is that Said's book was aimed at an academic audience. It's possible to be scholarly yet narrative, and there are any number of works that accomplish both. (My personal favorite: Caro's work on LBJ, which both tells an epic story and is supported by a mountain of original research.) But to put it frankly, Said's work falls flat after the first section, cataloguing endless previous works and name-dropping the hell out of scholars and gentlemen-adventurers who helped form the field of oriental studies.
In the end, I could only stand about 100 pages of the close-readings, eventually skipping large chunks in the hope that something—anything—would be worthwhile in the rest of the book. And to my dismay, there really wasn't. I should have been cautious due to Said's early-and-often asshole move of quoting French sources without providing any sort of translation, but quickly learned my lesson in trudging through the rest.
In the end, Said's book constitutes a lovely forest, yet gets lost in telling us all about every single one of the trees. There's material out there for a great and fascinating book, chronicling how the assumptions continued to be expressed in "reputable" works of the present; it just isn't this one.
Show Less
LibraryThing member msattic
A classic for anyone researching the representation of the East in Western literature. Since its publication Said's discourse has come in for some criticism, but it has widely been taken onboard in postcolonial studies and has been applied to many other subject areas and geographical regions. Very
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thought-provoking. As relevant today as it was at its first publication in 1978. Show Less
LibraryThing member awhayouseh
A difficult but very interesting read. Said denouces the ways that the WEST usually studies the EAST.
LibraryThing member ritaer
Said traces the history of contact between the West and the East and the resulting construction of the Orient as an area of study for Western scholars. Westerners come to believe that they understand the East and its occupants better than they understand themselves. This privileged knowledge is
Since the book was written in 1978 one might expect it to be outdated, but the events of the past two decades illustrate that Western powers continue to attribute the actions of Easterners (especially Muslims) to irrational cultural attributes rather than to rational self interest.
It is interesting that the older portrayal of the Muslim male as lecher surrounded by multiple wives and lithesome concubines has been partly reversed to an image of Islam as anti-sex with morality police roaming the streets in search of a flash of ankle or strand of hair for which a woman can be whipped.
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used to further the interests of the West in conquering or controlling these regions. Said had been attacked for his opposition to Israel's handling of the Palestinian question.Since the book was written in 1978 one might expect it to be outdated, but the events of the past two decades illustrate that Western powers continue to attribute the actions of Easterners (especially Muslims) to irrational cultural attributes rather than to rational self interest.
It is interesting that the older portrayal of the Muslim male as lecher surrounded by multiple wives and lithesome concubines has been partly reversed to an image of Islam as anti-sex with morality police roaming the streets in search of a flash of ankle or strand of hair for which a woman can be whipped.
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LibraryThing member aamirq
If the book and the subject clicks, you see "Orientalism" everywhere. And how true!
LibraryThing member cougar_c
I think one of the reviews describes the book as disturbing, which it is. Highly recommended for anyone opposed to the war against Iraq.
LibraryThing member krisiti
Orientalism (Vintage) by Edward W. Said (1979)
LibraryThing member jcelrod
One of the founding works of postcolonial theory.
LibraryThing member MeditationesMartini
Show me a more influential work of literary criticism than this one. Said's argument is reductive, ungenerous, exhilarating, compendious, and has supersaturated the way we see world and life. Without him how do we understand Bhabha, the Afghan war, MIA, the weirdo who trained us at the American
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school in Japan? He tars with a broad brush - throws a wild rock - and yet ends up right on target. Everybody, be a little less essentialist, a little less triumphalist, today. Show Less
LibraryThing member Brasidas
Edward Said's point in Part 1 of ORIENTALISM is that the discipline's mechanisms became in the end a way of acquiring another culture, a way of categorizing and, to a certain degree, constructing that culture for the West. Yes, and isn't this what Derrida was saying in the late sixties and
Said goes on at some length about the aforesaid acquisition of the "Orient" as a means and forerunner to colonization. I agree. But this point seems to beg the question: what other option did scholars have except to describe and classify and interpret? Is this not the only way human's have of understanding anything? Now was the orientalists' enterprise--I mean the result, the scholarship--often poor? Yes. Was it racist? Yes. And this is damnable. But how else were those in the West to begin to understand the East?
Niall Ferguson writes in EMPIRE that the British Empire was certainly one of history's "Bad Ideas." I agree. The extent to which Orientalism gave the rapacious West an idea of how to proceed, to that extent it was also bad. But did not Orientalism lay the groundwork for our far deeper, more nuanced and richer understanding of the East today? Scholarship is after all a process. I don't see, and granted I have not finished the book, how Said can tar all of early eastern scholarship with that brush; for did it not in the end lead us to where we are today?
Someone on this page has written that ORIENTALISM is both "reductive" and "ungenerous." Yes. I look forward to finishing the book and these notes.
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early-seventies long before ORIENTALISM's publication (1979)? Yet Derrida is never mentioned. What about Lacan's scopophilia as a means of racial othering. Likewise, nada.Said goes on at some length about the aforesaid acquisition of the "Orient" as a means and forerunner to colonization. I agree. But this point seems to beg the question: what other option did scholars have except to describe and classify and interpret? Is this not the only way human's have of understanding anything? Now was the orientalists' enterprise--I mean the result, the scholarship--often poor? Yes. Was it racist? Yes. And this is damnable. But how else were those in the West to begin to understand the East?
Niall Ferguson writes in EMPIRE that the British Empire was certainly one of history's "Bad Ideas." I agree. The extent to which Orientalism gave the rapacious West an idea of how to proceed, to that extent it was also bad. But did not Orientalism lay the groundwork for our far deeper, more nuanced and richer understanding of the East today? Scholarship is after all a process. I don't see, and granted I have not finished the book, how Said can tar all of early eastern scholarship with that brush; for did it not in the end lead us to where we are today?
Someone on this page has written that ORIENTALISM is both "reductive" and "ungenerous." Yes. I look forward to finishing the book and these notes.
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LibraryThing member nnschiller
Powerful for its method, rigor, & content. I must process it more, but it's something all Westerners need to process.
LibraryThing member HadriantheBlind
A literary/philosophical analysis of perceptions of 'the Orient' as something different, exotic, passionate, religious, and inferior.
The Orient as it was, was thought of as such - in many ways- since the Crusades, perhaps before, and all the way up to the Ottoman Empire. But as the Europeans
Im curious over why the author omitted German sources, and possible perceptions of West v. East Europe - the multiethnic Habsburg Empire, and the Russian 'yellow peril'. Or of Wilhelm the Second's mad dreams.
And I am curious as to perceptions of the West by East, as well. was it always an overbearing threat?
This fiery criticism of colonial attitudes has more or less been integrated into modern post-colonial discourse. This is a seminal, if flawed work.
The Orient as it was, was thought of as such - in many ways- since the Crusades, perhaps before, and all the way up to the Ottoman Empire. But as the Europeans
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became colonial powers, perceptions continued to influence action.Im curious over why the author omitted German sources, and possible perceptions of West v. East Europe - the multiethnic Habsburg Empire, and the Russian 'yellow peril'. Or of Wilhelm the Second's mad dreams.
And I am curious as to perceptions of the West by East, as well. was it always an overbearing threat?
This fiery criticism of colonial attitudes has more or less been integrated into modern post-colonial discourse. This is a seminal, if flawed work.
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LibraryThing member thegeneral
As I said before I was first introduced to Said as a first year history student in University through this very book. It is very interesting and worth taking the time out to read it but it is a difficult book to get into. This is eased somewhat by the updated preface, introduction and afterword
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sections which marry into the text quite well. The book is well referenced; as one would expect of a Said work, and he sets out to challenge the theories of Orientalism expostulated by numerous Orientalists of various hues and from different countries over the centuries. Said critically analyses how the Orient has been viewed through Western eyes over the centuries and how their attitudes towards issues such as sex, religion, culture, lifestyle and customs have changed over the centuries together with assessing the impact since the USA has become a significant international player. The substantial criticism that this book generated and the accusations that were levelled at its author, both numerous and spurious since its publication, are a very good reason to acquire it also. Show Less
LibraryThing member wealhtheowwylfing
Said's critique of Orientalism as an academic discipline is too larded with pomo craziness, with too little analysis (one could say, none) of the actual consequences of regarding all of Asia, the Middle East, and Egypt as one homogenous conglomerate of racist stereotypes.
LibraryThing member judtheobscure
Edward Said's Orientalism is a magisterial survey of western texts' depiction of the orient, particularly the Middle East and Islam, pointing out their essentialist bias. As academic writing goes this was clear and relatively easy to read. Unfortunately I was unfamiliar with most of his sources so
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the impact of his arguments was not as great on me but that is my ignorance not his fault. I do wish he hadn't conflated the orient with Islamic civilisations in particular, as I am sure there is much to be said about the depiction of other Asian peoples and cultures from the western lens, but there is only so much you can do in one book. Show Less
LibraryThing member danielbeattie
A terribly boring book, that any person should be able to see right through. As I read the introduction, I found myself alerted by the way Said stated his case. For instance how he dismissed important contributors to orientalist studies as unimportant, without presenting proper argumentation. He
I recommend reading Robert Irwings "Dangerous Knowledge" after reading Said, if anone should feel persuaded by Said's manipulative book.
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was a forger of history, and I am amazed that people are still reading this garbage in universities today. A harmful, and stupidifying book. Only for the numb of the mind, or the gullible.I recommend reading Robert Irwings "Dangerous Knowledge" after reading Said, if anone should feel persuaded by Said's manipulative book.
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LibraryThing member Beholderess
As been said by other reviewers, a seminal but flawed work. A must-read for every student of cultural studies, colonial/post-colonial studies and even history. The flaws include overgeneralisation and lack of nuance - the author does seem to be more interested in rhetoric and scoring a (valid)
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ideological points. For thorough review (both criticism and praise) I'd recommend "Reading orientalism : Said and the unsaid" Show Less
LibraryThing member MarieFriesen
The noted critic and a Palestinian now teaching at Columbia University,examines the way in which the West observes the Arabs.
LibraryThing member RajivC
This book by Edward Said will open your eyes. I am unfamiliar with many of the authors he quotes. Yet, I could follow the argument. Most of us grew up accustomed to treating Western texts as gospel. These texts influenced generations of people from the Middle East to the Far East.
Reading this
Read the book slowly: it demands patienc
Reading this
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book, I realized the need to rethink my concepts and understanding of Western texts. It is difficult for a Westerner to write about 'The Orient.' It is difficult for us to write about 'The Occident.' We bring our prejudices to the table, something I did not fully realize until halfway through the book. Read the book slowly: it demands patienc
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Subjects
Awards
National Book Critics Circle Award (Finalist — 1978)