Student’s Name Professor’s Name Subject DD MM YYYY ORIENTALISM Orientalism is an imagery pictured from the Western lens that visualizes differences of the Middle-east(Orient), specifically the Arab people, to the West(Occident) in terms of culture, norms, and sometimes, appearance. However, a significant amount of early oriental literature is not empirical, but imaginative. It involves seeing Arab culture as exotic, backward, uncivilized, and at times dangerous. Evolution of Orientalism The inception of Orientalism dates back to the early 19th century, however, it was revolutionized and shown in stark contrast only in 1978 by Palestinian writer, intellectual, and literary/cultural critic Edward Said in his book Orientalism. This essay will …show more content…
Said, in his book, drastically altered the term and its connotation. He re-appropriated it suggesting that the elite society of Europe used this contrast between the West and the East to reinforce its own ideas of superiority. This narrative allowed it to carry out barbaric practices and justify them in the facade of necessary measures to bring cultural stability. According to Said, Orientalism came to effective use for the empire during the period of European Enlightenment and Arab colonization. Europe could justify its heinous acts in the colonial era owing to a self-serving history in which the Occident construed the Orient as radically distinct, oppressive and inferior, laying grounds for the need of rescue by the West. He …show more content…
During the time of French colonization of Algeria, businessmen in France produced postcards of Algerian women to be circulated in the country. The misrepresentation in the images wasn't visible to the population, who thought that the photographs were taken from the everyday lives of the women, they were set up in the photographer's studio, often mistreated and abused. These photographs served as evidence of the inferiority of the Algerian culture, where men of the community were projected as imbeciles, savages, and incapable of living lives on their own, and women were projected as exotic objects only capable of being objectified by the lustful men in the West who fantasized penetrating their private
In this research paper I am going to talk about three issues,which are Dar al-Islam,West Africa and Europe. I am going to explain what happened during the 15th and 16th century with the three of them and how they interacted with each other. The interaction of dar al-Islam and Europe led to many important occasions including the discovery of the Americas,its colonization and the beginning of the slave trade. I will discuss the exchange, clashes, and what happened between these two "universes" that in the end affected West Africa and the whole world. Dar al-Islam is a term that refers to “the home of islam”.
They provide the exotic “other”, a juxtaposition with the Greeks who were perceived as the model of a civilized people, a literary trope that dates back to Herodotus and can be found in other Hippocratic texts, such as The Sacred Disease. The Greek author asserts that there is a certain “…feebleness of the Asian race” resulting from their “…mental flabbiness and cowardice.” (AWP 160) This, the author claims, leads them to be less warlike and be supportive of a monarchy—characteristics that would have been anathema to a Greek and would have placed Asians as mentally inferior to the Greeks. This emphasis on the inferiority of their mental condition is a theme that has been continued in by white authors in Western medicine with its views of Africans.
He writes about how the immediate difference is causing these races to be on the brink of extinction, mostly because of how backward these races are. Evelyn Baring (document 7) writes about how a European is better educated than an Oriental and a better thinker as well, but they also have a bond of hard work between them. During this time the British had colonized in Egypt, like they had in many other countries. The difference was that Egypt also took this as a good thing and they began to learn from the British and try to make themselves more educated and like the
the East. Through the 18th and 19th century the British Empire reached its peak, forming colonies all around the world. The popular imperialistic opinion was that the white man is responsible for molding the primitive cultures they encountered. The colonized population was viewed as backward, primitive. But these prejudices formed a fear of those “primitive” cultures invading western society.
‘The Good Earth’ and the Possibility of ‘Anti-Orientalist’ Orientalism In 1931, American author Pearl S. Buck published The Good Earth, an English-language novel depicting a peasant’s life in rural China. The novel was immediately a financial and critical success; after selling millions of copies, it would win the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. Buck’s writing was praised for its evenhanded and insightful portrayal of Chinese culture and society. Retrospectively, however, many scholars have criticized it as a well-intentioned but reductionist and Orientalist treatment of China. Using Said’s conception of Orientalism as an analytical framework, this essay examines and evaluates charges of Orientalism in The Good Earth.
Furthermore, differences in religion and spirituality led to moral colonization, as “them missionaries when they came here saw all these Indyuns ev’rywhere prayin’ real strange. Strange to them anyway… Guess they couldn’t figure out what was goin’ on so they decided we needed helpin’ in a big way. Called us savages, heathens, pagans” (p.107). Orientalism and otherization were useful tools justify cultural
This paper rediscovers Archibald Forder as a forgotten American Orientalist, who is surprisingly left out of account by postcolonial critics. Forder's travel books record his life, travel experiences, and missionary works in Trans-Jordan between the years 1891 and 1920. This paper illuminates how Forder’s depictions of the Arabs and “going native” process are in tune with an inherent ambivalence and contradiction of the colonial discourse. While Said (1978) iterates the Western negative representations of the Orient, Bhabha (1994) theorizes the colonized’s mimicry of the colonizer.
The book My Name is Red, published by Turkish writer Orham Pamuk in 1998 and translated into English in 2001, presents a story set in Istanbul during the reign of Sultan Murat III in the 16th century. Covering a timeframe of about nine days, two main events set the story forward: the murder of the renowned illuminator Elegant and the return to Istanbul of Black after being in exile for 12 years. Instead of telling the story from one single point of view, the plot is narrated by multiple people who are identified in the title of each chapter. Pamuk also examines the cultural tension between the East and the West by centering it on two different theories of art. On one side is the Western style of portraiture and on the other the Eastern miniature tradition.
It is an ideology fabricated by the West, Its main factors are the "periodic exclusion of the East from the Western gaze and the continual repudiation of the East in favor the moral and cultural coordinates of the West (Martin & Koda, 1994, p. 9). According to Said (1978), orientalism is a product of the imagination of those people who come to know themselves, their culture and territories as European and later as the West. Said (1978) defines orientalism as a style of thought based on " ontological and epistemological distinction between the 'Orient ' and the 'Occident ' (p.3). According to Martin and Koda (1994), the West 's failure to achieve full comprehension of the East is the reason for the inscrutability attributed to the East.
In the article, “The Arab World", anthropologist Edward T. Hall discusses how Arabs have a different concept of space and boundary than westerners for public and private places and how this can help explain certain aspects of how Arabs behave. As a renowned anthropologist who has written prolifically and has conceived several important theories in anthropology, Hall is quite qualified to write on the topic of cultural differences and his propositions might be considered extremely credible. Despite possessing such qualifications and writing a well-organized and logical essay, Hall’s arguments in the article are quite lacking because of a biased tone, a lack of evidence, an overreliance on ethos and the use of some logical fallacies. The article basically tries to ascertain how and why Arabs behave differently than people from the west based on “proxemics research”.