Summary Of Orientalism By Edward Said

Orientalism, is a book by Edward Said in which was very influential and controversial in postcolonial studies. Said redefined the term “Orientalism.” He defined it as a constellation of untrue assumptions expressing how the western attitudes toward the East were romanticized. Said starts off his book with the fact that the Orient played a key role in the “construction” of European and American culture, “the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the west) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience” (1). Said, born in 1935, was a Palestinian-American literary theoretician. He was a professor of English, history and comparative literature and a public intellectual. Said was also the founder of post-colonial studies. Orientalism, was published in 1978 and is what Said was best known for. This book is a critical analysis of what Said thought was the culturally incorrect representations that Orientalist take on the Eastern world. Orientalism is the study of the Eastern world through a western lens. This book contained three chapters that made up 365 pages. Said argues how European imperialists thought about people of a certain kind in their own colony and how the political culture shaped that colony.
Said discusses “knowing the oriental.” He starts by analyzing speeches and writings of two British …show more content…
This is done by implementing constraints, limitations onto the Orient, the “Occident” believes to be “truths” of the Orient, however, the “truths” they are taking in are learned judgments of the Orient that are built up by the power of the establishment. Which means that this process and orientalism is as destructive to Western culture as it is to the