Orientalism summary

The act of studying something is surely positive, in that it enables us to better understand the subject in question. But what if doing so actually yields negative results? This is exactly what happened with Orientalism, in the sense that it actually reinforced the subjugation of the areas under scrutiny.

For starters, Orientalism as a science was fueled by economic and political interests, starting with the Egyptian expedition and invasion led by Napoleon and his army.

Have you ever met someone you’ve heard so much about, but the person ends up being not at all how you expected? Well, the image of the Orient similarly didn’t line up with the way many experienced the East, and this disrupted the way Orientalists examined the Orient.

First, the experiences of writers and social scientists no longer matched up with what was once recorded about the Orient. French poet Gérard Nerval, for example, once romantically wrote about a past Orient that he had never actually witnessed, but which he simply dreamed up in his book Voyage en Orient.

After the resistance and revolutionary movements in the East, the West found it increasingly difficult to disseminate its so-called discoveries. Orientalism responded to this trend in a few different ways.

One approach was to expand. To compensate for their discipline’s lack of findings, Orientalists pushed back the borders of the places under scrutiny, while also learning more about the people there.

In the eyes of many Orientalist scholars, the best way to understand the Orient was to categorize its types of inhabitants, and this was done by studying the region’s languages.

Silvestre de Sacy (1758-1838) was among the first to categorize the Oriental mentality in accordance with each region’s respective languages. De Sacy was a linguist, and joint founder of the Asiatic Society – a French academic society focused entirely on Asia. De Sacy believed that thorough research into the language of a people would offer a deeper understanding of that culture’s mentality.

When visiting a foreign city, do you find yourself hoping to avoid any touristy activities, and instead wanting to do as the locals do? The Orientalists of the 19th century did exactly that in order to gather more information about the Orient.

Extended stays and immersion in local cultures allowed Orientalists to form categories with which to observe the Orient.

The turn of the 20th century saw the rise of an increasingly globalized and connected world, and the East began asserting itself against European dominance.

Anticolonialist resistance movements began to change relations between the Orient and the West. In other words, they caused the West, and specifically Europe, to question its economic and political presence in the Orient.

You may think that as colonialism came to a close, Orientalism also ended. Orientalism, however, is still very much alive today, but in a new form based in the United States, and with three key characteristics.

The first key characteristic of this American brand of Orientalism is its presence in popular imagination. Take the concept of the “Arab,” for example, which first entered the Western imagination during the oil crisis of 1973.