Orientalism

Introduction

Edward Said, a Palestinian-American professor of comparative literature at Columbia University, published Orientalism in 1978. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of discourse and Gramsci’s of hegemony, he reads scholarship, travel writing, novels and colonial administration – from Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 to twentieth-century American policy – as one system that constructed “the Orient” as backward, irrational and unchanging, the opposite against which “the West” defined itself. The book is counted among the founding texts of postcolonial studies. Among its critics was the historian Bernard Lewis, who accused Said of ignoring German scholarship and caricaturing a varied field; the two clashed publicly in The New York Review of Books in 1982.

Connections

Builds on

• Prison Notebooks1935 · Antonio Gramsci
• Discipline and Punish1975 · Michel Foucault

Taken up in

• Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples1999 · Linda Tuhiwai Smith

Criticized in

• Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse1981 · Sadiq Jalal al-Azm