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Obviously this is a must read, which has been much drawn on and critiqued by later post/anti-colonial writers. I have just read the copious notes I made when I read it in 2007 (sort of ironic that I read a westerner's gloss rather than re-reading the original!?) and noted some points of particular interest...

John of Segovia proposed a conference with Islam designed to produce mass conversion 'even if it were to last ten years it would be less expensive and damaging than war'

To me this is a perfect example of the assumption that in an 'objective' 'rational' comparison Islam/the Orient will be found inferior to Christianity/the West. It sounds absurd, yet the same attitude is reproduced constantly, including by mainstream feminists. I think non-Muslim/Arab/'Oriental' folk should put the question to ourselves whenever considering or discussing Islam or the Middle East: 'am I being John of Segovia?'

European Orientalism produced a very rich sophisticated body of knowledge (Said stresses at the outset that his text is not about comparing this construct to reality) that produced ideas - it is the corporate institution for dealing with the Middle East/Arab/Muslim world (henceforth, problematically, 'the Orient') - politically useful to European imperialist powers (henceforth, problematically, and including the USA, 'the West'). Insofar as it studied Oriental texts, it interpreted them according to sweeping generalisations, never the human particular. The words of an ancient poet would be used as the foundation for foreign policy.

Visitors to the actual geographical Middle East were disappointed not to find the world described in classic orientalist texts, and interpreted this as the (further, because orientalist dogma starts from an assumption of faded glory) degeneration of the Orient! Confrontation with reality has not disrupted the othering construction of orientalism; everything is digested and processed by it.

For example, by 1955 the Orient described by 17th 18th century texts could not be recognised anywhere. Yet since one of the dogmas of orientalism is that the Orient cannot change, this new and strange place is out of order, full of pathological 'dis-orientals' and, I might cheekily offer, 'rogue states' which 'we have lost'. National liberation movements shattered the image of passive, fatalistic subject populations, but they were replaced with the image of 'extremists' who were not true to their real passive fatalistic natures. Anticolonial movements are interpreted as insults to Western democracy.

H.A.R Gibb argued that Islam is fundamentally flawed, yet cannot change. Any attempt to change it is a betrayal.

Orientalism ignores class interests, political circumstances and economic factors. There is only the unchanging oriental character to consider.

To conquer the Orient is to liberate it, because 'Arabs, especially Muslims know nothing about liberty & Islam is structurally favourable to fundamentalism' (this is the argument made by new-atheist critics like Dawkins and Grayling)

Latent orientalism: the distillation of ideas about the Orient & orientals eg sensuality, femininity (Said points out that orientalism is a masculinist perspective), despotism, passivity, indifference, inaccuracy, backwardness, is distinguished from manifest orientalism: stated views about oriental history, society, literature, land and identifications with other philosophies. Any change in knowledge of orientalism takes place in the latter category, never deconstructing the former.

American orientalism is even more reductive, with none of the imaginative investment of European orientalism, but with the same cultural hostility and imperial projects. Arabic is studied for policy objectives.

The liberal veneer: 'we' study 'others' to get to know them, understand their cultures, so we allow them to represent themselves (within the confining space of orientalism)

Principle dogmas of orientalism:
1. The West is rational, developed, humane, superior while the Orient is underdeveloped, aberrant, inferior
2. Abstracts are always preferable to direct evidence since Orientals cannot be trusted
3. The Orient is uniform and unchanging, incapable of self definition, and the generalised and systematic vocabulary of orientalism used to describe it is entirely objective.
4. The Orient is to be feared, pacified by research and development, preferably occupied.

The central myth is the 'arrested development of the semites'; Western power enables the reproduction of this myth.

Methodological failures of orientalism cannot be accounted for by saying the real Orient is different from orientalist portrayals or that orientalists, being Westerners, can have no inner sense of what the Orient is all about: Orientals are now educated in native lands in colonial founded underfunded universities with no good libraries and too many students. The USA is seen as the source of all learning, so students go there & learn orientalist dogma.

Said asks: How does one represent another culture? What is another culture? Is the notion of a distinct culture race/religion/civilization useful or does it always get involved in self-congratulation or hostility & aggression? Construction of identity (never natural & stable) is bound up with power and powerlessness in each society. For example, in Shalimar the Clown Rushdie presents a complex and shifting picture of religious identity in Kashmir; Islam is complicated by context and is not at all the same everywhere. Cultures are so inter-related and interdependent that unitary/simply delineated descriptions of their individuality are junk.

Scholars deny, suppress or distort the context of power that produces their systems of thought to maintain the fiction of scholarly disinterest (now we acknowledge and apologise for them, but proceed with our imperialism)

Western civilization is an ideological fiction, implying detached superiority of a handful of values & ideas meaningless outside the history of conquest immigration travel & mingling of peoples that gave western nations their present mixed identities. The USA for example is a palimpsest of different races & cultures sharing problematic histories of conquest, exterminations and major cultural & political achievements.

Said's aim is not to (paraphrased:) dissipate difference – the constitutive role of national & cultural differences in relations between people can't be denied - but to challenge the notion that difference implies hostility and the frozen, reified set of opposed essences & adversarial knowledge built out of these things. We need new way of conceiving the separations & conflicts that stimulated generations of hostility war & imperial control.

'Animosities & inequalities represent not an eternal order, but a historical experience whose end may be at hand.'

ضروري.

I started to pick at this foundational work while I was still in Iraq (2007). Things I saw from both Americans and Iraqis began to remind me faintly of some half-remembered ideas from Said's pen. Said's stated purpose of writing was to show how an intellectual study such as Orientalism can not be viewed independently from the influence of power dynamics on an author. Orientalism, he stated, responded directly to the West's need to possess and control an East that it considered inferior, doing so through "owning" it in academic domination as well as politically and militarily. This was accomplished by grossly over-generalizing "the Other" negatively, whether with a hostile or a benignly condescending mood. That's this book in a nutshell, and I'm OK with that. But it's over 300 pages of development of this concept throughout the history of the field of Orientalism. By the end, I just wanted to yell, "So if Orientalism is so wrong in its findings, what's the right approach?" By spending the whole work criticizing, Said neglects to give us a real counterposition. Though this isn't his stated purpose, it's no wonder many misinterpret his purpose to be one of wholesale condemnation of the West, despite his protestations to the contrary in the Afterword. Said claims Orientalism to be a study that purposely excludes the East from having a voice, but in a strange way, so did Said. We never actually read what the "complex realities" of the East are that Said faults the Orientalists from omitting.

An intelligent and insightful book about how the West has stereotyped and dehumanized the East through racist and oppressive representations of the East as backwards, uncivilized and in need of Western revitalization or aid. Edward Said writes at length about the origins and development of Orientalism throughout history and how it has culminated in and contributed to anti-Arab sentiments. He raises important and thought-provoking questions about interrogating how places are represented, who has the power to create representations, and what are the consequences of those representations. His point about how universities in the United States wield so much power in their construction of knowledge about the East struck me – just as much of this book did – as unfortunately relevant to today still even though this book was published in the 1970’s. Here’s one quote in particular that I liked:

“In a sense the limitations of Orientalism are… the limitations that follow upon disregarding, essentializing, denuding the humanity of another culture, people, or geographical region. But Orientalism has taken a further step than that: it views the Orient as something whose existence is not only displayed but has remained fixed in time and place for the West. So impressive have the descriptive and textual successes of Orientalism been that entire periods of the Orient’s cultural, political, and social history are considered mere responses to the West. The West is the actor, the Orient a passive reactor. The West is the spectator, the judge and jury, of every facet of Oriental behavior. Yet if history during the twentieth century has provoked intrinsic change in and for the Orient, the Orientalist is stunned.”

I give this book four stars instead of five because I found the language super dry and hard to get through at times, despite the quality content. It took me over a year to get through this book because I would read it for a little and find myself dissuaded by the writing, like, am I just not “smart” enough to get this book or enjoy this dense writing? Maybe I’m not and that’s fine with me. But, if not for a burst of motivation over the past couple of days I’m not sure when I would’ve finished Orientalism. Even though I found the language somewhat tedious I’d still recommend this book given the pervasiveness of imperialist and racist notions of the Middle East that exist today.

Incredibly nuanced, beautifully written, most other academics wish they were on this level,

The way this book was explaining the prevalence ond logic of Islamophobia I had to check the date, expecting it to be a very current book. Frightening that although it was written in the 70s the sort of racism and terror-mongering described in it is if anything more wide-spread than ever. This book very eloquently shows how orientalism works- it makes no parallels to things like the male/female binary (who speaks, who describes whom, who is exoticised as "other", less and deficit) but to me reading as a feminist that parallel definitely exists which made Said's argument very understandable (even though he has read so many impenetrable writings and quoted some of them in French...not always with a translation).

As an Australian who is interested in post-colonial thinking, I also found that Said's analysis (though localised) made sense in terms of the way Indigenous cultures have been "known" and "owned" by us as a colonised/colonising nation. This, then must be the source of why we were told in critical Indigenous pedagogy class to avoid pronouns such as "us" and "them". Said admits there are no easy answers but show the danger of blythely following thinking without asking the questions. So much of the last few pages was quotable!

A difficult read, very difficult but very worthwhile and I suspect it has been influential (though not yet enough).

Orientalism is a study in the history of ideas, by Palestinian-American comparative literature professor Edward Said. The work traces the development of the perception of westerners of easterners from antiquity to the early XX century. It is mainly focused on the Levant and the Muslim East. East Asia is mentioned only as a destination for which the Muslim East was an important gateway. Said builds his theses on two major concepts of XX century philosophy: Michel Foucault’s ideas about knowledge and how it is related to power, and Antonio Gramsci’s cultural hegemony. Although the disciplines of philology and linguistics were very important in the field of Orientalism, Said gives much more importance to the literature written about the East in the XIX century, literature being his field of study, but for a reader who is not familiar with these authors it might be difficult to criticize his interpretations of these works.

 

From Antiquity to the middle ages, the East is represented as the essential Other. It is everything the West is not. Ancient authors enjoyed characterizing it with vague epithets, as long as they are not usually used to describe the West. The East is thus exotic, sensual, slavish, despotic…This will only be amplified by the coming of Islam as a political power, and the huge threat it represented on the door steps of Europe. It is an era of fear for westerners, combined with complete ignorance and misunderstanding. With the rise of the West in the beginning of the modern era, westerners started to develop a much wider interest in the region, with all the economic and military advantages a much more precise knowledge could give them. Travelers were the first to open what will become an odyssey of one civilization to describe and characterize another, a very unique venture in human History. Then the conquerors showed up, with England in India and Napoleon in Egypt. The marching troops were not only infantrymen, but also sophisticated scholars who went to explore what time had swallowed from these ancient civilizations, to expose what the indigenous population lost or forgot, and save it from oblivion. It was time for major linguistic and archeological discoveries, the birth of Egyptology, Assyriology, biblical criticism and the indo-European hypotheses. Then the romantic dreamers followed along to get their share in this great conquest, some of these authors did visit the East, and some of them only heard of it, but all were very enthusiastic about exploiting its inherent difference and exotic appeal in their literary projects.

 

The conquerors, scholars and the writers were all expressing a sort of unchallenged Volonté de Puissance over the East. Ruling it and knowing it were two inseparable things. The indigenous population was not only under the shackles of the imperialists but also had the essence of its traditions, religion, way of life and whole world view described, linked to an essential character which is the Eastern character, once known it is enough to understand what makes an easterner one and what differentiates him from a westerner. All of this inside a now established institution called Orientalism, recruiting an army of scholars and backed by Empires and agents overseas. Nothing will represent this further than the merger of the scholar and the administrator to create the ultimate governor of easterners who govern efficiently because he knows what is most essential in his governed. This is personalized in the imperial agents of the beginning of the XX century such as Lord Cromer and T.E Lawrence.  

 

The fading of the two major European imperial powers will be a major shift in the discipline. France and Britain are no longer the centers of the study of the East, although their strong legacy remained pivotal in all that came after. American institutions of eastern studies produce much of the orientalist literature today. Even though it blended with other disciplines such as Sociology and History, it did not mean that some of its XIX century premises changed. Usually it is the same paradigm, dividing the world to two antagonistic entities, then searching for the essence of the Easterners and its consequences in the world they live in and on others around them.

 

Said argues that Orientalism is an essentialist reductionist and politically motivated discipline.  It institutionalized and perpetuated clichés about the East and gave them the prestige of a real social science. It served the agendas of the conquering empires. In the study of other human groups, the dangers of human fiction are numerous. Orientalists not only described the East but also gave it a voice. They spoke for the East, retrieved its treasures and saved its legacy. Real Easterners were never heard nor had the chance to fight back. Orientalists were thus free to perpetuate the same images over and over. The very notion of the East is in itself a gross approximation which allocates a certain character to the inhabitants of a vast geographical area, neglecting all the differences and the peculiarities of each of the sub groups. It also presents group identity as rigid, static and eternal. Which is far from reality. Civilization is a collective human construct which keeps evolving and changing. The identity of a certain group is not an unchanging fact, History shows us that it is rather a fiction created overtime under certain circumstances and responding to certain needs.   


Said also questions the possibility of the very existence of a disinterested scholarship. Any scholar is evolving and serving a structure which defines his methods and sets his goals, a system which he cannot escape. The quest can never exist outside of his author’s ideology, if we define ideology as a vision he holds of the world. Most of the time he is either defending it or refuting its adversaries.


For a lot of readers, Orientalism will sound like a long rant against western imperialism and also western scholarship. Most will agree about the imperialism part but for the scholarship it is a more complicated matter. The endeavor to know the East, no matter how flawed or politically motivated, is one unique venture in Human History. It is undeniable that the ancient languages deciphered, the archeological sites uncovered were a monumental human achievement, an unparalleled contribution to human knowledge. Said’s language seems to discount this to concentrate only on the fact that it was done by imperial means. Even if it all started by a desire to define, know and master the Other, westerners went further. They are not the only group who use the concept of Otherness either. It is enough to open a random page from the Coran to find a strong distinction between the believers and the non-believers, and perhaps in some Chinese chronicles, they are describing some uncivilized neighbors they fight or conquer. The systematic study of westerners is a step further than hatred and fear, although this does not justify its means yet it must be acknowledged that it was an enormous gain to humanity in general.

 

Said rarely mentionnes a defining parameter in the very existence of Orientalism.  The discipline wouldn’t have existed or had the power it had if Easterners did not leave the void it came to fill. The silence of the East is real and not a mere fiction of orientalists.  Scholarships in the East lagged behind and still lagging to this day. Eastern scholars use orientalist works as their starting points, if they had access to it or knew about its existence. Easterners failed to write about themselves let alone write about others. Despite the blame on westerners for this one sided narrative they create, it is difficult to say that the other side was not excluded intentionally, but it did not show up to the discussion. Said seems aware of this, in order to have a real cultural dialogue the two sides should at least contribute with an equal degree. Knowing how hard it is in the current circumstances, any reform in the discipline still has to come from inside, from the westerner side again.


This is particularly true in the case of the Muslim East. Which is where Said spends most of the last half of the book. Bringing China to his reasoning will complicate the equation. Sure in the late XX century so many circumstances changed its relationship to the west which challenged the way the west viewed it. In the meantime nothing really changed in the Muslim East since Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt, the animosity with the west has never reached a similar level since decolonization, this situation allow so much of the Orientalist tradition to be valid to this day. If orientalists spoke from inside an imperialist interventionist structure from which they cannot be isolated, then Said speaks from a structure which is marked by centuries of humiliation and frustration. A Palestinian displaced by overwhelming ideological, military and materially superior powers.


I apologize for such a long review! So many things to say. Edward Said’s Orientalism is a book to love and hate. That is why he sparked so much controversy. This is proof that after all those centuries of eastern studies were not a waste of time. Knowledge is a collective effort which is constantly questioned. It is only with contributions such as this book that advances are made.

Edward W Said - Orientalismo. Representações Ocidentais do Oriente
Orientalismo de Edward Said é um livro sobre as representações que o ocidente faz do “Oriente”, tema que o autor analisa em três dimensões – numa perspectiva histórica, uma outra literária e de filologia e uma última política. São dimensões diferentes que Said entrelaça e entre as quais estabelece pontes. Sendo ele professor de literatura comparada e especialista em filologia, como decorre do texto, dá mais ênfase a estes aspetos, o que me parece excessivo para que um leigo o possa acompanhar. Contudo, nesta abordagem que seguramente faz com adequação e profundidade, a limitação é seguramente minha. Porém o que mais me interessa são os lados político e histórica que no contexto do livro me parecem ficar demasiado perdidos.
Quando o autor aborda o “orientalismo” pelo lado político e histórico o texto ganha uma outra vitalidade e capacidade de agarrar o leitor, e fá-lo com tal intensidade que fico com curiosidade em ler outras obras suas como “A Questão da Palestina” ou “Cultura e Imperialismo”.
Em Orientalismo a questão essencial para Edward Said é a forma como o ocidente vê o oriente, e de que forma essa visão deturpa a realidade mas também inquina o que o ocidente conhece do “Oriente”, atribuindo-lhe características que ele não tem. Diz o autor – quem observa, o que observa não corresponde ao observado. Diz ainda que este erro de paralaxe resulta de preconceitos, e que estes resultam em novos preconceitos dificultado o conhecimento da realidade quanto mais se aprofunda esta abordagem de conhecimento.
A leitura que Said faz da realidade está correta, mas tirando preconceitos óbvios o autor deveria ser mais prolixo em nomeá-los. E este aspecto parece-me importante porque a distância entre quem observa e o que é observado existe sempre. Quantos estrangeiros como Henry Fielding; Ramón del Valle-Inclán; Richard Francis Burton; Miguel de Unamuno; Edith Wharton; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; Charles Dickens; Hans Christian Andersen escreveram sobre os portugueses descrevendo-os como um povo dado à saudade, à melancolia e fatalismo, à espiritualidade e à introspecção. Estavam errados? Enquanto povo damos estas impressões a quem nos visita, ou são injustas estas observações? É óbvio que os observados têm sempre uma opinião enviesada sobre si. Empresas e organizações quando pretendem uma avaliação isenta não a procuram fora do seu círculo interno?
A relação entre “Nós e os Outros” é sempre uma relação complicada. Numas coisas vemo-nos piores do que nos descrevem, mas o saldo é habitualmente mais positivo para o nosso lado. Eu sou português, sou melhor que os “outros”. Sou do Porto, sou melhor que os do outro lado do rio. Sou melhor, assim me vejo, que o meu vizinho de cima apesar do mesmo estar em quase tudo um nível acima de mim. Porém, será que isto faz de mim xenófobo, racista, narcisista ou apenas humano? Nunca somos o que achamos que somos e muito menos quem gostaríamos de ser! E é isto que Said não colocou em equação. Nunca somos o que gostaríamos de ser nem provavelmente como os outros nos veem. Somos apenas humanos.
Para Edward Said Orientalismo significa a forma como o ocidente vê e descreve o oriente. Partindo deste pressuposto Edward Said descreve-nos de que forma o conceito foi evoluindo ao longo da história, que transformações teve e como foi transformado e moldado em diferentes contextos por múltiplas figuras que sobre ele se pronunciaram desde a antiguidade clássica mas de forma mais incisiva nos séculos XIX e XX.



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Said argumenta que as primeiras noções de "Oriente" já aparecem na Grécia e na Roma antiga, onde o Oriente (principalmente a Pérsia) era visto como o oposto, uma região exótica e desconhecida, mas em simultâneo uma ameaça ao mundo greco-romano (obras de Heródoto e as descrições das Guerras Persas, começam a delinear uma imagem do Oriente como o "Outro".


Durante a Idade Média, o contato entre o Ocidente e o Oriente intensificou-se durante as Cruzadas e com o comércio com o mundo islâmico. Nesta representação, para além do perigo do outro, perigo que foi amplificado quando os preconceitos religiosos e culturais manifestaram a sua influencia e os muçulmanos eram retratados como inimigos da cristandade (escritos de S. Tomas de Aquino e os cronistas das cruzadas). Com o renascimento as trocas comerciais aumentaram de intensidade e com elas as trocas culturais e uma mais profunda curiosidade pela cultura oriental (relatos de Marco Polo e de outros viajantes europeus).
Com a expansão dos impérios e as fronteiras coloniais (sec XVII e XVIII), o conceito de orientalismo começou a cristalizar no ocidente como uma disciplina académica. Nesse período, o Oriente e particularmente o que se relacionava com o Oriente Médio, a Índia ou a China começou a ser estudado de forma sistemática, mas sempre dentro de uma estrutura de dominação imperial. O conhecimento produzido sobre o Oriente servia para facilitar a dominação colonial (Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle; William Jones). O século XIX marca a consolidação do orientalismo como uma disciplina e temática académica à medida que os impérios europeus (especialmente o britânico e o francês) intensificavam sua presença no Oriente. Durante esse período, o orientalismo tornou-se mais científico e institucionalizado, e figuras como filólogos, historiadores e arqueólogos dedicaram-se ao estudo do Oriente, mas sempre dentro da lógica do poder imperial. O Oriente era visto como algo a ser "classificado", "civilizado" e "controlado" (campanha Egípcia de Napoleão Bonaparte; Ernest Renan; Silvestre de Sacy; Edward William Lane).
No século XX, o orientalismo continuou a ser uma ferramenta poderosa da política imperial dos estados, mesmo com o declínio formal dos impérios europeus após a Primeira Guerra Mundial. As representações do Oriente, especialmente no cinema, na literatura e nos meios de comunicação de massa, perpetuavam estereótipos sobre os povos orientais, agora vistos sob a lente do "subdesenvolvimento" e da necessidade de modernização ocidental. Ao mesmo tempo, movimentos nacionalistas e de resistência nos países orientais começavam a emergir, questionando essas representações e lutando pela descolonização (T.E. Lawrence; Gertrude Bell; obras como "As Mil e Uma Noites" foram adaptadas ao cinema para criar uma imagem de fantasia e exotismo que influenciou gerações de ocidentais, desde Hollywood até os romances de aventura).
Com o fim dos impérios e os movimentos anticoloniais, e em especial a partir da segunda metade do século XX, houve um crescente questionamento do orientalismo, à medida que os países anteriormente colonizados se tornavam independentes e os acadêmicos pós-coloniais começaram a criticar as representações ocidentais do Oriente. Said coloca-se como parte desse movimento de busca e desafio às premissas e ideologias que sustentaram o orientalismo por séculos (Said; Frantz Fanon; Aimé Césaire; Albert Memmi).
Segundo said, o orientalismo, segundo Said, resulta de um processo evolutivo no qual o Ocidente, ao longo dos séculos, construiu e refinou uma visão distorcida do Oriente, cada vez mais institucionalizada e ligada ao poder imperial, um processo pelo qual não se representava apenas um oriente que dessa forma ficava cada vez mais moldado à dominação imperial.

Para Said o termo orientalismo representa um discurso no sentido foucaultiano, ou seja, um conjunto de práticas, representações e conceitos que moldam a forma como o Oriente é conhecido e entendido, e o poder é exercido pelo de forma a justificar o colonialismo e o imperialismo ocidentais. O oriental é visto como o outro, alguém, um local oposto ao ocidente, um lugar de exotismo, irracionalidade, atraso e despotismo, em contraste com o Ocidente. Para Said estas representações são simplificações distorcidas que negam a complexidade e a diversidade das culturas orientais.
Neste processo de descrição, há o poder de controlar o que se descreve o que de acordo com Michel Foucault é uma forma de poder. O ocidente ao descrever o seu oposto, o oriente, controla e domina o conhecimento que produz. Este poder legitimado pela descrição desempenhou um papel importante no processo de colonização (Médio Oriente, Ásia e Norte da África(.
Para Said, esta visão deturpada que o Ocidente fazia do Oriente resultava de o tratar como uma entidade única; frequentemente descrito com estereótipos simplificados de exotismo, sensualidade, misticismo ou o despotismo; as narrativas orientais construídas pelo Ocidente descreviam o Oriente como passivo, decadente ou incapaz de autogovernar-se. O Oriente era visto como algo a ser "descoberto", "estudado" e "civilizado" pelo Ocidente, negando qualquer agência ou iniciativa própria aos povos orientais. O oriental era um objeto da história, enquanto os ocidentais eram os sujeitos, ou seja, os protagonistas do progresso e da civilização; as narrativas ocidentais descreviam o Oriente como atrasado e irracional, e deixavam de fora todos os aspectos que não se encaixavam nessa imagem. Mesmo eventos históricos complexos, como revoluções ou resistências, eram interpretados como sinais de fraqueza ou desordem, sem um esforço genuíno para entender as causas profundas desses movimentos; o Oriente era frequentemente retratado como exótico, misterioso e sensual – um lugar de fantasias e escapismo. Essa imagem, em grande parte fantasiosa, era usada tanto na literatura quanto na arte, reforçando a ideia de que o Oriente era algo "outro", diferente e inferior ao Ocidente, mas ao mesmo tempo atraente no seu exotismo; Said acusa ainda os estudiosos ocidentais de se terem apropriado do saber sobre o Oriente para seu próprio benefício, sem reconhecer ou valorizar os intelectuais e pensadores orientais; o Orientalismo é ainda uma ferramenta de poder político que justifica a expansão colonial, a intervenção militar e as políticas imperialistas do Ocidente. Ao representar o Oriente como incapaz, o Ocidente encontrava uma justificativa para invadir, colonizar e dominar essas regiões, afirmando que era para "ajudar" ou "civilizar"; as representações ocidentais frequentemente retratavam o Oriente como algo preso ao passado, incapaz de se modernizar ou acompanhar o progresso. No entanto, Said argumenta que isso ignorou os processos e transformações que ocorreram nas sociedades orientais, especialmente na segunda metade do século XIX e no início do século XX reforçando dessa forma as estruturas de domínio.

I tried but failed to read the entirety of this book's turgid prose, in fact I am pretty sure that the number of those who use the term Orientalism who have actual read Said's book is probably as small as the number of Marxist who have read Marx or the number of people who include Joyce's Ulysses as one of their favourite books who have actually read it.

The book was interesting, but deeply flawed. It created a paradigm that was not only false but easily observed and thrown back at anyone and everyone who had a contrary view to what Said believed. It was also deeply flawed in perspective and scope, his Orientalism was chiefly concerned with Palestine and Egypt, had nothing to say about areas East of Suez so even his definition of the 'Orient' is dubious. Of course he had some interesting things to say but his book has grotesquely overshadowed the work of others as well as becoming a simplistic catch phrase. The work is mired in contradictions - he absolutely hated the author Paul Bowles and the writer Robert Irwin but the basis for his attacks on them and other writers would actually work against Said as his own background, education and the language he wrote in makes a profile of these classic 'Orientalist' that he condemns.

Re-examining literature of the past, our views and way of looking at things is essential, there is so much we don't realise we take for granted and how often our views are full of presumptions which we never think of. But simple reductive sloganeering is no real help. Said constructed a phantom which he then demolished for his own ends. You can't ignore him but you'd do far better to read the Wikipedia entry first and then look at more recent, and older, and more subtle authors who have applied his ideas but to more interesting affect.

An amazing classic book from the late Edward Saïd about the origins of the Western view of the Orient that shaped literature and music in the 17th-20th century. It is a penetrating view of various racial stereotypes of Arab peoples (dressed in sheets smoking hookahs and generally under-educated and prone to laziness and violence) that pervades all levels of society and served the interests of colonialism to appease consciences of all the violence and subjugation that occurred in China, India the Middle East and Northern Africa. Particularly in these troubled times with racial slurs against Muslims becoming common currency (amd electoral policy), it remains relevant and eye-opening. Highly recommended along with its sequel, Culture and Imperialism.

Extremely repetitive. I had to force my way through most of the second half of the book. I expect a little repetition with history books, because often the same topic will be approached from different angles, but it was excessive.

I found the language of the book to be needlessly convoluted (academic writing does not have to be boring, and I have been lucky enough to read plenty of wonderful academic works). The arguments were mostly good and backed up well, but occasionally the narrative would randomly jump to make a completely different point (I’d physically scrunch up my face in confusion) and Said did not even bother providing credible sources. It read as though he let his personal bias color his writing and was unwilling to provide the same level of proof that he did for his other points when he jumped around.

It’s also tricky regarding the handful of authors that Said quoted as “proof” of a literary tradition of a fantasy Orient. I’ll believe it because I’ve read enough to get what he’s talking about, but it’s hard to prove something culturally WELL and he didn’t quite dig deep enough. He was both over- and under-specific.

I’m still glad that I read it though, because he provides an invaluable perspective on how to approach “orientalist” works after growing up in the western world. It’s definitely a useful book to read and have in mind, but I’d take his arguments with a grain of salt.