Orientalism

Blurb

Orientalism is a 1978 book by Edward Said, a critical study of the cultural representations that are the bases of Orientalism, the West’s patronizing perceptions and fictional depictions of “the East” — the societies and peoples who inhabit the places of Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East. That Orientalism, Western scholarship about the Eastern World, was and remains inextricably tied to the imperialist societies who produced it, which makes much Orientalist work inherently political and servile to power, and thus intellectually suspect.
That in the Middle East, the social, economic, and cultural practices of the ruling Arab élites indicate they are imperial satraps who have internalized the romanticized “Arab Culture” created by British and American Orientalists; the examples include critical analyses of the colonial literature of Joseph Conrad, which conflates a people, a time, and a place into a narrative of incident and adventure in an exotic land.