What is Orientalism?
The representation of Asia in a stereotyped way that is regarded as embodying a colonialist attitude
What did Edward Said say about Orientalism?
- That orientals were a social construct and that the term simultaneously identifies and homogenises
- The orient played an instrumental role in the construction of the European culture as the powerful other
- “Orientalism as a western style for dominating restructuring and having authority over the orient”
- Said that europeans divided the world into two parts, the east and the west- The occident and the Orient, the cultured and the uncivilised
Islam, the middle east and orientalism?
-The ME is framed as a region of violence, the produces anxieties which develop in to racism and then blame
Orientalism creates a hierarchal structure because westerners subordinate muslims
The idea of the dominated/dominating binary
Its as if the west is a beacon of democracy and the muslim world is full of backwardness and intolerance
America has created its own machinery of truth about islam, though its lens is directed and has small narrative that are produced and reproduced
Example: Women in middle eastern countries being represented as oppressed and silenced by their religon
