لا يحلل سعيد أصل الطابع الطاغي والمهيمن لهذه الثقافة، فهي بالنسبة له سائدة ومهيمنة لأنها غربية
كتاب "الاستشراق"، ليس دفاعا عن لإسلام فقط، انه هجوما وفضحا لبنية الاستشراق اللاإنسانية، المهيمنة، وكشف لأسسها الإستعمارية، وشبكة المصالح المرتبطة بها،

nie będę udawać, że wszystko zrozumiałam, ale czułam, jak powiększa mi się mózg

Reading this book dispelled a lot of the caricatural ideas about Orientalism that permeate fields like political science and sociology and Near Eastern/area studies. Namely, this is the purely academic origins of Orientalism -which are inextricably intertwined with geopolitical facts but nonetheless exist independently of those facts insofar as the Academy *created* and *elaborated on* the Orient in such a way as to produce/influence those same material facts. The almost wholly academic origins of Orientalism- specifically in literature- go largely unremarked on when discussed in the vast majority of fields in which ‘Orientalism’ is employed as an accepted liberal buzzword. However, the uncovering of these origins as laying the groundwork for a widely accepted and intelligible set of relations between the Occident and Orient illuminates the ways in which Orientalism remained unchallenged for so long, was so easily integrated into literature, scholarship, etc. unquestioningly, and became a hegemonic citational archive. Indeed, these facts are necessary to understand the way in which imperialistic and neocolonial policy towards “the Orient” was shaped and validated. Orientalism is more than just racism or Islamophobia- although much of Orientalism’s beginnings are inflected through a specific focus on and denigration of Islam as a deviant religion- encompassing moreso the production of monolithic, passive, sexualized, feminized, impotent, ahistorical, atemporal ideas of the Orient and its people. Whether these projects were inflected through Arabs or Semites or etc., the specific was always used (or ignored) to validate the abstract notions which had been cemented in the academic archive that constituted Orientalism. Thus, Orientalism is a deeply conservative academic discipline, one which finds its own image in every specific particularity (discarding those which dare not to reflect Orientalism back onto itself). This discarding of experience for abstraction marks off the Oriental as always-already impotent (not sexually, but culturally, politically, and historically). They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented: and this representation by the Occident was used as a process of consolidating the identity and superiority of the Occident in turn. In fact, the imagined/produced bifurcation between Occident/Orient is necessary insofar as the Orient needed to be created in order to create the Occident and therefore construct hierarchies of power, civilization, etc. Orientalism is a long process of re-presentation in which this generative act served dual purposes as processes of Western self-actualization and discovery through the unveiling of the coy mistress that is the Orient (note the always-already sexualized language through which the Orient is denoted, described, and delimited as the manifestation of a larger tendency towards portraying the Orient (and the Oriental) as oversexed, always operating in gross excess). Of course, this excess was mystifying and seductive for the Westerner constrained by cultural norms of propriety, etc., thus explaining the perverse obsession with the Orient as simultaneously a space of degeneracy and lack and one of radical freedom and excess. To paraphrase from Said, there is no real Orient that stands in contrast to the portraits of the Orient and there is no inner/outer sense of the Orient that is inflected onto a local/foreigner binary. There is no real or true Orient: the Orient is “a constituted entity” and the idea that “there are geographical spaces w/ indigenous, radically ‘different’ inhabitants who can be defined on the basis of some religion, culture, or racial essence proper to that geographical space is equally a highly debatable idea…” Said leaves us with a series of questions before ending his monograph which are worth repeating here in full: “How does one represent other cultures? What is another culture? Is the notion of a distinct culture (or race, or religion, or civilization) a useful one, or does it always get involved either in self-congratulation (when one discusses one’s own) or hostility and aggression (when one discusses the ‘other’)? Do cultural, religious, and racial difference matter more than socio-economic categories or politicohistorical ones? How do ideas acquire authority, ‘normality,’ and even the status of ‘natural’ truth? What is the role of the intellectual? Is he there to validate the culture and state of which he is a part? What importance must he give to an independent critical consciousness, an oppositional critical consciousness?” Overall, this was an amazing, formative, and profound book that challenges not only conservative academia but liberal over-simplification of Orientalism and an incorrect conflation of the West with Orientalism or Arab/Islamic/Oriental societies as perfect. Said’s COML and ENGL backgrounds are apparent and make this a unique work that I know I will bring into my work far into the future!

I’ve been ashamed I hadn’t read Orientalism, and now I know I had reason to be ashamed. It’s rightly a classic. Though its ideas have seeped out so that much was familiar, there was a lot of clarity in going back to source.

I expected a more ‘pugnacious’ book, to use a word from the back cover. But it’s not pugnacious in style or content. Perhaps in the first shock of publication it seemed so. It’s a fair-minded book, ‘humanist’ in a word he refuses to relinquish (that wins my heart). His point is not to condemn or consign to oblivion the entirety of the West’s scholarship and art on the Orient. He just makes us aware of the structures of thought in place. When it came to figures I have an attachment to (T.E. Lawrence; his hero Charles Doughty; other travelers), I never felt Said was telling me I have to cease to read them. And I wasn’t disenchanted, because I knew these guys were riddled with Orientalism even if I didn’t have the terms (in fact, I’m stalled in Doughty from years back where he has an egregious instance; I’ll get over it and pick him up again, for his wonderful observation and the prose style Lawrence so admired). You cannot say fairer than what he says of Richard Burton, along with the useful analysis that only Said has said.

This book is a feat of thought that probably has its little inexactitudes as his detractors like to point out. It re-visioned things and has a larger scope than the still-contentious area of 'Islam' and 'the West' (still? I’m glad he’s not alive). He explains how scholarship isn't innocent of politics – not just in the case of the West on Islam, and not even to fault that case, because scholarship cannot exist in a safe bubble, away from the hustle and bustle of the politicised world around us. I think it is this which gets backs up, more than the charge that he is anti-West (he isn’t). I’ve seen scholars respond that they are indeed innocent of politics; but if I ever cherished that thought, too much reading history has ruined me. If I can tell a not-irrelevant tale: in my own research area, in Asia, in his Orient, as an innocent researcher who didn’t know much about historiography, I grew increasingly flummoxed and exasperated by the attitudinal problems in mainstream, prestigious histories. It turns out, the best thing I could have done in order to understand what I saw was wrong with Mongol history-writing, was read Said. Its applicability goes wider than Islam-and-the-West.

The only time I think he’s irascible in tone is in the 1995 Afterword, when he’s obviously been in a feud with Bernard Lewis. I’m sorry his book met hostility in certain quarters, because, as I say, it’s not damnatory of the tradition, and if Orientalists or their heirs don’t see there’s room for this sort of criticism, that’s sad. With his 2003 Preface – the year he died – he has returned to the serene tones of the main work, although, with the downturn in world events, he sounds a sadder and a wiser man.

The book was written as a classic ought to be, without the jargon of the day and a pleasure to read. It may become too detailed in its case studies for most people’s purposes; I used the skip button, but this is not my last encounter with Said’s great work.

A seminal work which really revolutionised the humanities, particularly when looking at non-western cultures, Said's Orientalism is something which really needed saying and that now, at least for those of us who have been through graduate studies in the humanities and social sciences after the publication of this book, does seem kind of obvious. However, things only look obvious after someone pointed them out, and Said does a great job of systematically pointing out the way in which Western scholarship constructed the idea of the "orient" on a bedrock of prejudice, colonialism and racism. 

Said systematically charts the construction of the "orient" as a handmaid of colonialist projects of England and France with in depth analysis of authors and works from the 18th century onwards. If there is a problem with Said it is the way in which he limits his analysis to these countries, but then he was just opening a conversation, others did follow in his footsteps for the realities of other European countries which had their own specific ways of relating to the fabled orient. 

A book that is as interesting for the collection of works, authors and citations which help prove Said's point as it is for the kind of conversation that Said is attempting to start, one which faced considerable resistance on the part of western academia but which was eventually vindicated as new generations of scholars started taking in Said's points. This doesn't mean, however that the problem he raises is in any way solved, and if there have been improvements in the Social Sciences and Humanities in the way Asia and North Africa is spoken about there, the problem is, as countless middle eastern military adventures have shown, that those people actually have very little power of decision when it really comes down to it. Essential.

This is a seminal postmodern postcolonial work of critical theory and cultural studies, deconstructing one of the most dominant grand narratives of our civilization, that continues to fuel xenofobia and wars.

Let me say first that this will be a very gross summation of this classic that I first encountered through literary theory, in particular, postcolonial theory, but it is an attempt that I nevertheless will make. If I could I would make the entire world read this book, extremely relevant as its subject matter remains today.


Edward Said’s Orientalism is a treatise on the cultural construction that is Orientalism, which, far from merely an academic and scholarly discipline, is inextricably bound with power (as knowledge always is), in particular imperial and colonial, and which rests on the binary opposition between East and West and the connotations that go with such a divide. The point that Said makes above all else is that Orientalism, a science in its own right from the nineteenth century onwards, part of a dominant discourse, gives rise to epistemological systems that formulate the Orient as an atavistic, essentialist object of study, which, seen as a platonic concept, inert and unable to represent itself, is thus dehumanised and in no way a true picture of the real Orient. In fact, what Said says is that there can be no real Orient; it is an invention of Orientalists, a representation, not an ontologically stable picture. The point is that there is no real, separate and distinct essence of any culture or people and anything anyone says about them, grouping them thus, will be only a representation that can in no way be taken for objective knowledge, steeped as it is, for one thing, in the Orientalist’s own contexts. Said emphasizes that Orientalism is very political indeed and not a pure science or just innocent scholarly endeavours given that it is deeply connected with European Imperialism as well as the neo-imperialism of today in which America dominates. Said focuses specifically on Islamic Orientalism and argues that Islam or the Arabs cannot be reduced to an essentialist and reductive definition by either the West, as they doubtless are, or the East itself because such objective formulations cannot help but be false. Said also clarifies that in no shape or form is this book anti-Western or a defense of Islamicist fundamentalism, doing which would in fact defy the very anti-essentialist position that he is taking in it. It is instead a multicultural work which studies the way knowledge, culture, and power, work together, and ultimately takes, despite postmodern critiques of the term, a humanistic position, resisting the way human history is disfigured through most other approaches and aiming “to go beyond coercive limitations on thought toward a non-dominative, and non-essentialist, type of learning.”

had gewoon de Wikipedia-pagina moeten lezen jezus

I am here reviewing two books, each of which has made a little splash in its own way. Of the two, Edward Said's Orientalism has had more time to develop a following in the academic community than Colin Woodard's much more recent American Nations. However, Said's work is both less entertaining and far more frustrating in that it posits what amounts to a banal observation via ponderous exposition. Said says nothing much at great length in complaining that academia, infected by colonialist thought since at least the eighteenth and especially nineteenth centuries, filters the East through a biased lens that portrays its folk, lit, and folkways as exotic, barbaric, libertine, inferior, and essentially in contrast to the West. Specifically, he claims that western tradition describes "[t]he Oriental [as] irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, 'different;' thus the European is rational, virtuous, mature, 'normal.'" (page 40) He finds this to be a sad state of affairs.

Well, yes. News of the existence of latent and structural nativist prejudice should come as no surprise to anyone. But the world is round; a point of reference is essential when discussing a sphere. Who (or what) exactly is East and who (or what) does Said define as the West?

To be clear, the Orient and Occident of which he writes are divided between 'Others' ranging from north Africa to Japan, but excluding Europeans and the far flung former constituents of Greater Britain such as the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. His primary focus is on Arabs (arguably former Ottomans); oddly enough, he has nothing to say about Sub-Saharan, central, and East African peoples; no Spanish (or any) depictions of indigeneous Central and South Americans; precious little regarding Mughals, Indians (Rudyard Kipling getting the heave-ho here), or possibly the Turkic and Mongolian peoples of central Asia (although a quick look at the Baburnama might have been instructive in support or opposition to his thesis); jack all of the Chinese, Koreans, or Japanese, nor epistles or poems of Melanesia, Micronesia, Polynesia, or the entire southeast Asian peninsula (with apologies to fans of James Michener, Thor Heyerdahl, Colleen McCullough, and other Occidentals filling out that canon).

Still and notwithstanding Said's desire to limit the scope of his investigation, he's initially all over the map. "But one big division, as between West and Orient," he writes on pp. 57-58,

leads to other smaller ones, especially as the normal enterprises of civilization provoke such outgoing activities as travel, conquest, new experiences. In classical Greece and Rome geographers, historians, public figures like Caesar, orators, and poets added to the fund of taxonomic lore separating races, regions, nations, and minds from each other.… From at least the second century B.C. on, it was lost on no traveler… that Herodotus… and Alexander… had been in the Orient before. The Orient was therefore subdivided into realms previously known, visited, conquered, by Herodotus and Alexander… Christianity completed the setting up of main intra-Oriental spheres: there was a Near Orient and a Far Orient, a familiar Orient, which Rene Grousset calls "l'empire du Levant," and a novel Orient. The Orient therefore alternated in the mind's geography between being an Old World to which one returned, as to Eden or Paradise, there to set up a new version of the old, and being a wholly new place to which one came as Columbus came to America…. Certainly neither of these Orients was purely one thing or the other: it is their vacillations, their tempting suggestiveness, their capacity for entertaining and confusing the mind, that are interesting…. These are the lenses through which the Orient is experienced, and they shape the language, perception, and form of the encounter between East and West. What gives the immense number of encounters some unity, however, is the vacillation I was speaking about earlier. Something patently foreign and distant acquires, for one reason or another, a status more rather than less familiar….

In other words, what group A writes about group B may well vary from author to author, being inherently limited in scope to what has been encountered personally or as mediated by others (those being all the options) and therefore subject to change. Yet what all accounts retain in common is the defining label "Oriental," which over time begets a familiar, if meaningless, stereotype for readers.

Said goes on to describe this on pages 59-60 as an unremarkable and natural occurrence, even if persistently negative encounters lead to an inherently negative portrayal:

[W]here Islam was concerned, European fear, if not always respect, was in order…. What Christians typically felt about the Eastern armies was that... "they devastated everything..." For Europe, Islam was a lasting trauma…. Like Walter Scott's Saracens, the European representation of the Muslim, Ottoman, or Arab was always a way of controlling the redoubtable Orient, and to a certain extent the same is true of the methods of contemporary learned Orientalists…. There is nothing especially controversial or reprehensible about such domestications of the exotic; they take place between all cultures, certainly, and between all men. My point, however, is to emphasize the truth that the Orientalist… performed this kind of mental operation. But what is more important still is the limited vocabulary and imagery that impose themselves as a consequence.

Said, who in over 50 pages of preface, introduction, and afterword wrings his hands over the questionable impact and relevance of his argument, ultimately peters out more than he concludes. At page 325, he apologizes, "My project has been to describe a particular system of ideas, not by any means to displace the system with a new one…. How does one represent other cultures? What is another culture? Is the notion of a distinct culture (or race, or religion, or civilization) a useful one, or does it always get involved either in self-congratulation (when one discusses one's own) or hostility and aggression (when one discusses the 'other')?... No one can escape dealing with, if not the East/West division, then the North/South one, the have/have-not one, the imperialist/anti-imperialist one, the white/colored one…"

Speaking of which, what can we find lurking within the psyche of the good ol' U.S. of A? Assuming the natural existence of illusory, corrupt, and arbitrary splits running the gamut of (Western) scholarship and lay literature, let us turn to their intersection in the nonfiction of a freelance journalist. What does the author of American Nations express?

For Colin Woodard, all American internal policy conflict devolves from ideologies borne of the eleven "national" personalities, mapped thus:



[And here's the B&W version from the book that's a bit easier to read.]

Discounting the Inuit population of First Nation (because the author does), here are the nations' chief alignments and characteristics as one might roll them off a twenty-sided die:
New France - consensus-driven, socialist, multicultural, and independent. The DM (or GM, if you prefer)
Yankeedom - "public Protestants," people who value the perfection of the collective good over that of the individual and see government and advanced education as the primary means to its attainment. Lawful Good.
The Left Coast - the progeny of Yankeedom and Greater Appalachia's Borderlanders, they are now utopian lovers of self-expression and exploration, environmentalist. Neutral Good.
Greater Appalachia - independent, irascible, intolerant, God-fearing nationalists suspicious of elitism in any combination of wealth, privilege, education, or social engineering by public works. Chaotic Good.
The Midlands - middle-class pluralists resistant to major status quo changes, instinctively skeptical of passionate pols. Lawful Neutral.
El Norte - independent, self-sufficient, and working class Hispanics. Also Lawful Neutral.
New Netherlands - multicultural, laissez-faire, and materialistic. True Neutral.
The Far West - excluding Mormons, these are resentful, industrial-welfare dependent libertarians whose allegiance swings toward whichever of their two principal benefactors (major corporations and the federal government) appears to be investing the most in local infrastructure. Chaotic Neutral.
Tidewater - gentry built on respect for authority and tradition, albeit eroded by Appalachian and Midlander intrusions. Formerly Lawful Evil, and moving toward Lawful Neutral.
The Deep South - "private Protestants," people who value privilege, oligarchy, and wealth incumbency, and otherwise exist to thwart the egalitarian-leaning intrusions of Yankeedom. Except for the black people living there, who are essentially disenfranchised. Neutral Evil.

So far, so fascinating. Woodard built his map historically, by colonization, immigration, and the wanderings of the Wells Fargo wagon. By contrast, here's a look at the 2016 popular vote map:
, or, for those who prefer a bit more purple:

Oh, and 2012:


You make the call. In drawing his tribal map, Woodard dispenses with racial, religious, and class distinctions. He asks that we overlook the disparate impact that geography, climate, and land use impose on rural and urban constituencies' need for resources and their respective translation into competition for the same tax dollar. And forget North vs. South, the author's thesis rather rests on a theory entitled the "Doctrine of First Effective Settlement," which he quotes at page 16, "Whenever an empty territory undergoes settlement, or an earlier population is dislodged by invaders, the specific characteristics of the first group able to effect a viable, self-perpetuating society are of crucial significance for the later social and cultural geography of the area, no matter how tiny the initial band of settlers may have been." Through such a colonial-begotten filter does the whole of modern American history drip.

It's an interesting concoction served up from some pretty weak tea leaves. Woodard reads American history like a Rorshach pattern, and while he strives to cherry-pick historical events to support his argument, history remains too messy a blot to cooperate with his chosen arrangement. Counterexamples abound: are these anomalous or do they lead toward a rejection of the national structure Woodard proposes?

So on pages 155-6, he is forced to observe, "One caveat in this account: unlike their American countrymen, neither the Yankee sections of the Maritimes nor the Midlander swaths of Ontario had much say in the development of their political institutions…. Government followed the Tidewater model, only with imperial appointees standing in for the local gentry. Voting rights were extremely limited, and the press was tightly controlled…. The governor -- always a Briton, never a colonial subject -- could dissolve the local legislatures at any time…. It was a system that, in the words of Ontario's first governor, aimed 'ultimately to destroy or to disarm the spirit of democratic subversion.'" Later, he argues that such a spirit in fact stems from the Quebecois. And what of the traditional regional split between rural and urban constituencies indicated on the following page, in which farmers in western Massachusetts and northwestern Connecticut petition to join Vermonters in holding off from the proposed federation until they could gain relief from the threat posed by neighboring New Yorker land speculators? It seems to me that the conflict reflects less any monolithic "Yankee" ideology, than classic political factionalism arising from straight-up economic competition.

Woodard's argument requires him to view naturalized founders as aliens to his tribes. On pages 157-9 he paints West Indies reared Alexander Hamilton as an opportunist with an animus for Appalachian folk, citing his determination to honor the war bonds poverty had forced many to sell to speculators only to tax the whiskey those selfsame mountaineers relied upon in lieu of currency. This was a bona fide double-whammy for Appalachian peoples, but not one designed to target them specifically. As Robert Chernow (and Lin-Manuel Miranda) fans understand, Hamilton's fiscal policy was a practical and effective means that used financial mechanics to bind together and establish solvency for a fragile, nascent nation. Woodard's assertion that it reflected a corrupt plot to enrich Hamilton as the expense of Scots-Irish settlers relies on sources debunked by contemporary (and hostile) Congressional investigation.

Again at pages 280-281, Woodard encounters historical confusion with respect to the purported homogeneity and solidarity of his ethnic and cultural blocs' worldviews over a sweep of forty years..

After the 1960s, nortenos were no longer powerless residents of El Norte; from local school boards to representation in the U.S. Senate to the New Mexico governor's mansion, they had begun running the region again…. The culture wars of the 1990s and 2000s were in essence a resumption of the sixties-era struggle, with a majority of people in the four northern nations generally supporting social change and an overwhelming majority of those in the Dixie bloc defending the traditional order. (Opinion in El Norte and the Far West varied, based on the issue at hand.)

Attitudinal inconsistency reigns again at page 292 relative to perceptions of Vietnam. Yankeedom, New Netherland, and the Left Coast youth led protests and delegations who "provided the core of antiwar sentiment in Washington," while "The Midlands neither forcefully challenged nor endorsed the controversial conflict…." And yet he concludes the same paragraph, "One [Midlander from] Baltimore… killed himself by self-immolation outside Secretary of Defense [Yankeedom] Robert McNamara's office in solidarity with Vietnamese monks who'd done the same in front of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. Far Western political representatives [who had a heavy financial stake in the military-industrial complex] generally supported the war… El Norte representatives were stalemated, with even Hispanic congressmen at odds over Cambodia and other war-related issues." Sounds just like a country divided to me, and not one split per se along the "national" lines claimed by the author.

Per Said (at page 327), "contemporary Orientalism teaches us a great deal about the intellectual dishonesty of dissembling [about the tendency toward demonizing or trivializing the 'other'], the result of which is to intensify the divisions and make them both vicious and permanent…. Perhaps if we remember that the study of human experience usually has an ethical, to say nothing of a political consequence in either the best or worst sense, we will not be indifferent to what we do as scholars."

Edward Said's strength lies in his exhortation of humanism over tribalism. No doubt, this is also the source of his popularity. I suppose it's a message we need to hear, no matter how trite and therefore dull. Racism and nationalism are bad, and we are best to remain conscious of their continuously corrosive effects. Got it. No arguments there, I'm all for keeping an open mind.

Quite irrespective of Colin Woodard's boundary drawing, divisions exist among people. Reasonable minds differ, and context is every bit as crucial as culture. We are not all of the same mind. So when it comes to remaining alert for, being skeptical of, and so overcoming my own long-inculcated prejudices, well… easier said than done. I'm not consciously hostile to others, but if you'd please sit a respectable distance from my teapot while we talk I'd feel more comfortable, thanks. Yes, we are all ultimately people. As the joke goes: "I like folk music. It sure beats birdsong." But just you try telling that to Olivier Messiaen.

Said era de origem palestina e foi professor de Literatura na Columbia University. Este livro foi escrito ha mais de 40 anos, mas continua muito atual e é uma leitura essencial para entender o Orientalismo (a visao ocidental do Oriente que nada tem a ver com o Oriente real), a apropriaçao cultural e o desrespeito com o lugar de fala do outro.

Nao podem representar a si mesmos: devem ser representados. (Karl Marx)

  
Jade e Latifa ai, ai...

Este conflito oriente x ocidente se vê nos livros religiosos, na historia, na literatura, desde a Antiguidade Classica até os dias atuais.
Faz uma significativa contribuiçao a construçáo do discurso orientalista, obras de Goethe, Hugo, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Kinglake, Nerval, Flaubert, Lane, Burton, Scotl, Byron, Vigny, Disraeli, George Eliot, Gautier e outros.
Enquanto lia, lembrei imediatamente de Habibi, a coisa mais orientalista, misogina e racista que ja li na minha vida, mas é bem avaliado por todos aqui no Goodreads. Esta HQ apresenta varios clichês que Said mencionou no livro:

O próprio orientalismo, além do mais, foi uma província exclusivamente masculina; do mesmo modo que muitas corporacões profissionais durante o período moderno. Ele via a si mesmo ao seu tema de estudos com antolhos sexistas. Isso é especialmente evidente nos escritos de viajantes e romancistas: as mulheres costumam ser criaturas de uma fantasia masculina de poder. Elas exprimem uma sensualidade ilimitada, sao mais ou menos estúpidas e, acima de tudo, desejosas, o orientalista ve-se como aquele que realiza a uniáo entre o Oriente e o Ocidente, mediante, principalmente, uma reafirmaçáo da supremacía tecnológica, política e cultural do Oeste.

Nos filmes e na televisáo o árabe é associado à libidinagem ou à desonestidade sedenta de sangue. Aparece como um degenerado super-sexuado, capaz, é claro, de intrigas astutamente tortuosas, mas essencialmente sádico, traiçoeiro, baixo.

O oriental é irracional, depravado (caído), infantil, "diferente"; desse modo, o europeu é racional, virtuoso, maduro, "normal".

Lewis sugere que o árabe é pouca coisa mais que um ser sexual neurótico.

Eu estou impactada e ficarei assim por muito tempo. Recomendo a todo mundo que reconhece a importância da representatividade.

The books racializes Islam, which is very problematic since this leads to demonization of anyone who would be critical of the doctrine of Islam and such people would be branded racist accordingly. This also results in shielding Islam from criticism, and conflates Islam and muslims as one and the same thing.
Furthermore it promotes anti western sentiment and victim mentality, and while racism has existed and does exist (albeit much less now than before), it takes the grievance as far as casting the west as the "inherent villain" merely by virtue of having had more advantage than the "orient".

Had been reading this book for MONTHS and finally finished. It’s definitely a fundamental and pioneering text in the field that advanced many original critiques especially for the time, but nonetheless a dense, repetitive, and laborious read.

Btw, I actually really enjoyed reading the Afterword — it gave a much clearer and more succinct breakdown of Said’s major themes and ideas…

“…as a system of thought Orientalism approaches a heterogenous, dynamic, and complex human reality from an uncritically essentialist standpoint: this suggests both an enduring Oriental reality and an opposing, but no less enduring Western essence, which observes the Orient from afar, and from, so to speak, above. This false position hides historical change. Even more important, from my standpoint, it hides the interests of the Orientalist. Those, despite attempts to draw subtle distinctions between orientalism as an innocent scholarly endeavor and Orientalism as an accomplice to Empire, can never unilaterally be detached from the general imperial context that begins its modern global phase with Napoleon‘s invasion of Egypt in 1798.”