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Summary Of Edward Said's Orientalism

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In his conjectural work Orientalism, Edward Said conveys the construction of the "Other" through the pursuit of exploration and the attempt to spread Christianity as the first Europeans encounter distinct cultures much different from them. Further, orientalism is closely related to the concept of the Self and the Other because it makes a distinction between the Occident, or the self, and the Orient, or the Other. The self is the colonists and the Other is the colonized, which can be seen through the many violent confrontations between the Europeans and indigenous peoples. In order to understand the Other, orientalism is an important aspect of the West that must first be thoroughly explored. Orientalism solves preconceived notions of who certain people are, what they believe, and how they act will act - even if the West has never been there or have seen them before. The way the west views other people and culture distorts the actual reality of who they …show more content…

The Other is a term used to describe someone or something that is different from the rest whether they are marked by "differences in races, gender, class, religion, or ethnicity". The Other is everything that lies outside of the self. The self is the familiar and the other is strange. With this understanding, "the relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony". The "Other" serves as a framework that we use to comprehend the different and the strange. As a result, a misconceived image of those we don 't "know" is produced. In the case of the Europeans, they created their own image of the Other in order to strengthen their own identity and superiority through exploration and conversion. The concept of the "Other" serves as a cultural challenge as there contains a possibility of misunderstanding. But an

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