The Undertow of Orientalism: A Close Reading of Select News Stories on the BBC Website (original) (raw)

“How About Reconstructing Orientalism?”: A Summary And Overview Of Edward Said’s Saturated Criticism

Edward Said is viewed as the creator of the academic development of post-colonialism, largely with his transmission of the concept " Orientalism. " Orientalism is considered his magnum opus. He is a forerunner in the deconstruction of the so-called 'Western' forms of hegemony that not only subverts the traditional understandings of 'Occident' and 'Orient', but also the " East-West, " as being simplistic, binary oppositional platforms, divorced from the necessary divergent ontological framework for understanding the reality of the current-day. Yet, these false and simplified platforms are continuing in the common worldviews, at the expense of losing a clearer understanding of our conditions.

The East-West Dichotomy: From Orientalism to Postcoloniality

IOSR Journals , 2019

The main purpose of this study is to define and explain the concept of 'Orientalism' developed and practised by Edward Said, a pioneer postcolonial theorist. According to him, the concept of Orientalism refers to the western views about the Orient or the East. However, it has raised a number of debates among the scholars on defining his concept. It can be defined in three ways as: an academic field of study, an epistemological and ontological way of looking at the world and a western hegemony. It has also been the focus of a number of controversies and polemics such as crisis on Orientalism, its connection with western theories and the rise of Occidentalism. Many scholars agree with the fact that the publication of the book Orientalism is a beginning of postcolonial discourse in history, philosophy, anthropology, arts and literature. Similarly, it provides an approach to the study of non-western texts. Interestingly because both Orientalism and NonWestern Studies deconstruct the Western Studies, both are therefore sometimes referred to as 'poststructuralist' approaches.

Orientalism on Trial: Rethinking The Post-colonial Project in The East

International Journal of Arts and Humanities Studies

This article explores the perplexities revolving in the vicinity of Orientalism. It tries to discern, dissect, and (re)view Orientalism and its role in shaping today’s world, more importantly, the binomial ambivalence of the West versus East connection. Said’s work, Orientalism, is going to be the locus of this article. In his book, the author tries to describe how the West perceives and represents the East. Through the author’s journey in the U.S., where he spent most of his life, he noticed that the West considers the East a one homogenous and static body. Edward Said’s stance on the separation of the world into two entities and the postcolonial project did not go unnoticed. In this article, the author’s work is analyzed in relation to his critics such as Ahmed Aijaz, Bernard Lewis, Samuel Huntington, and others.

Orientalism by Edward Said: A Study of Postcolonial Culture

zahraa, 2023

The article will discuss how postcolonialism addresses themes like Orientalist discourse, loss of identity, ethnicity, culture, oppression, and representation in the modern period. As a field of study, it adopts a deconstructionist attitude, and it questions what the colonized do and how he behaves when the colonizer confronts him. Orientalism is a key work for

Criticism to Orientalism

Criticism to Edward W. Said's Orientalism, 2019

The publication of Edward W. Said’s Orientalism marked a momentous intervention in the historiography of Western imperialism and Western representations of the Middle East. Many regarded Orientalism as “one of the most influential scholarly books published in English in the humanities in the last quarter of the twentieth century”(Lockman, 2004: 190). The book stormed up a debate in the academic world by accusing the West of having a skewed and condescending view towards the East, particularly in the several ways in which Westerners portrayed and represented non-Western cultures. While Orientalism generated sympathy and agreement, it also raised complete rejection. Alexander Lyon Macfie points out this aspect in his book Orientalism (2002) as: “Opinion regarding the validity of Said’s Orientalism was then mixed. But a pattern of sorts can be detected, based not so much on the nationality and religion of the scholars and intellectuals concerned as on their attitude to history and the modern and post-modern philosophical ideas (deconstruction, truth as illusion, intellectual hegemony, and so on) which frequently influence it” (109). The present paper tries to bring an approach to criticism made towards Edward Said, his influential theory and Said’s partial response to those criticism.

‘Undreamt by Tyrants and Orthodoxies’: Edward Said, Orientalism, and the Politics of Cyberspace (full text)

'Other Voices, Other Cultures: Rereading Orientalism', Jadavpur University, Kolkata, 12-14 Aug. 2004. Edward Said’s last published discussion of Orientalism, a re-reading of his 1978 study twenty-five years on, a critique of the contemporary Orientalist orthodoxies of the United States, and a vigorous defence of humanism, appeared first on the bilingual web site of the Arabic Media Internet Network, AMIN, on 6 August 2003. The following day the work appeared under the title ‘Preface to Orientalism’ at the Cairo-based Al-Ahram Weekly On-line. Three weeks later, on 28 August 2003, the Penguin Modern Classics twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Orientalism appeared in Britain, with the earlier-published AMIN and Al-Ahram essay as its New Preface. One account of this subject would address the politics of absence that pertains in the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The purpose of this paper, however, is to address instead Said’s response to such a politics, his turn in the last years of his life to ‘the enormously encouraging democratic field of cyberspace’. The paper will demonstrate that Said’s late work written for on-line publication is instrumentally related both to his understanding of Orientalist discourse and to his theories of resistance to it, and that this body of work, 140 essays written in the last five and a half years of his life, yet to be sifted through by scholars bound to the discourse of commercial publication, in important ways extends Said’s critique of Orientalism and his understanding of the post-colonial condition. The theoretical frame will be Said’s often-quoted and much-misunderstood 1978 introduction to Orientalism. But for that text and the earlier-written but later published The World, the Text, and the Critic, the texts under discussion have yet to appear in conventional print publication. Attendees will be provided on CD-ROM an annotated bibliography of Said’s work written for on-line publication from January 1998 to September 2003, with hyperlinks to the primary texts, registered under a Creative Commons license that allows non-commercial reproduction and distribution.