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Orientalism


Orientalism is an academic term, used in art history, literary studies, geography, and cultural studies, which is and describes a critical approach to representations of the Orient; of the Eastern cultures of the Middle East, North Africa, South West Asia, and South East Asia, represented as “European knowledge of the Orient” created by artists and writers from Western Europe. In particular, Orientalist painting, representing "the Middle East", was a genre of Academic art in the 19th century. Likewise, Western European literatures treated and dealt with the Orient and things oriental; the cultural influence was notable in the application of Asian visual styles to genres of Western art, especially in architecture and the decorative arts.

Since the publication of Orientalism (1978), by Edward Said, the academic discourse of critical theorists featured the term Orientalism in applications particular to the variety of cultural imperialism imposed upon the societies of the Near East, which is the cultural hegemony that politically justifies Western imperialism. The praxis of cultural imperialism reduces (essentializes) those societies as culturally static and intellectually undeveloped; the fabrication of cultural superiority is that Oriental culture is a thing (an Other) that can be studied, depicted, and reproduced. Implicit to the orientalist fabrication is the culturally opposite idea that Western society is developed, rational, flexible, and thereby superior, whilst Oriental societies are inferior for being undeveloped, irrational, and inflexible.

Orientalism refers to the Orient, in reference and opposition to the Occident; the East and the West. The word Orient entered the English language as the Middle French orient. The root word oriēns, from the Latin Oriēns, has synonymous denotations: The eastern part of the world; the sky whence comes the sun; the east; the rising sun, etc.; yet the denotation changed as a term of geography. In the “Monk's Tale” (1375), Geoffrey Chaucer wrote: “That they conquered many regnes grete / In the orient, with many a fair citee.” The term “orient” refers to countries east of the Mediterranean Sea and Southern Europe. In Place of Fear (1952), Aneurin Bevan used an expanded denotation of the Orient that comprehended East Asia: “the awakening of the Orient under the impact of Western ideas”. Edward Said said that Orientalism “enables the political, economic, cultural and social domination of the West, not just during colonial times, but also in the present.”


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