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India Today: An Encyclopedia of Life in the Republic

By: Arnold P. Kaminsky and Roger D. Long, Editors

ORIENTALISM

SIPRA MUKHERJEE

Orientalism is the name given to a particular kind o f approach to the Orient (including India,

where the argument has been particularly well received and has many adherents) and to

things Oriental as put forward by Edward Said (1935–2003) in his book Orientalism (1978).

Said argued that the domination of the Orient by the West had been sustained by a

literature developed especially since the 18th century that represented the Orient in a

particular way. This literature, he wrote, represented the East repeatedly as an exotic,subhuman “Other.” Over the course o f two centuries of reiteration and self-reference, this

created a body of work that came to be accepted as one of systematic knowledge about

the Orient.

Said believed that this literature was not an innocent misrepresentation of the Orient but

intead was a cultural apparatus that operated “as representations usually do, for a

purpose, according to a tendency, in a specific historical, intellectual, and even economic

setting.” Through ana lyses of literature on the Orient, he argued that this knowledge was

produced in situations of unequal power and was mostly a prejudice serving political ends.

Said enumerated four currents in 18th-century thought—expansion, historical confrontation,

sympathy, and class ification—upon which the intellectual and institutional structures of 

Orientalism were based. As evidenced in travelogues, novels, scholarly texts, and letters,he believed that the West constructed a discourse about the Orient that explained the

East’s differences in

530

terms that were in accordance with Western standards and therefore judgmental. This

made it possible to comprehend and consequently reject practices that were essentially

different as belonging to an earlier rung of civilization that the West had already climbed. If 

one believed in this framing of the Orient, it was then acceptable and even desirable that

the lands of the East should be subjugated and ruled by the so-called superior West.See also Asiatic Society of Bengal; Asiatic Society of Mumbai; Postcolonial Studies

Further Reading

Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto and Windus, 1993.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978.

MLA

MUKHERJEE, SIPRA. "ORIENTALISM." India Today: An Encyclopedia of Life in the Republic . Ed.

Arnold P. Kaminsky, Roger D. Long. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2011. ABC-CLIO eBook 

Collection. Web. 23 May 2013.

Select Citation Style: MLA

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