Introduction to Edward Said

Edward Said is renowned for his comprehensive study of 'Orientalism'. This is essentially a term used to describe the blurred lens in which Western society view the East. He refers to the narrow-minded attitudes of the Western world which stereotype how Eastern citizens are perceived to behave, look, react and live in everyday life. These stereotypes are quite often made by people who may not have even visited or known anyone from the Orient, and are simply generalising an entire nation into a belief system, which originated during colonialism (Sardar, 1999 p. 3).

In a YouTube interview with Said (Jhally 1998), images of women wearing traditional dress are romanticised by light shining over their golden skin suggesting the sexualisation of Eastern women developed by Western society. According to Said, as illustrated in David Cronenberg’s 1993 film version of Madame Butterfly (Cronenberg 1993), Oriental women were considered to be desirable and mysterious (Said 1995, p.1). In Said’s critique ‘Orientalism’, he describes the stereotypical East as a place of “remarkable experiences and landscapes” (Said 1995, p.1) Said recalls discovering a recurring "repertoire" of images of the orient, the "sensual woman whose there to be used by the man"(Jhally 1998).

Said explains his initial interest in researching Orientalism began after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war (Jhally 1998). He suggests that the Israelis saw the Arabs as people who are cowardly and unable to fight. When coupled with his own experience of being an Arab, he started to spot extensive contrasts between reality and the Eastern perception (Jhally 1998), The difference is particularly noticeable in the travel literature of Marco Polo. As critic Manzurul Islam (2008) writes, Polo’s travels to the East contain “the full range of the tropes of othering that shaped the Western sense of identity and difference” (Conklin Akbari et al. 2008) This implies that because the West had knowledge through technology and therefore the ability to travel, they had power (Sardar 1999 p. 10).