Communications & Media Research Paper: Edward Said “Orientalism”

Edward Said “Orientalism”
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Edward Said “Orientalism”
Orientalism describes the means related to seeing that emphasizes imagines, distorts and exaggerates the differences of Arabian culture and their people compared to those of the United States and Europe. Orientalism is a concept that involves seeing the Arabian culture to be backward, exotic, uncivilized, and even dangerous at the time. Edward Said defines it as the acceptance by the West as the primary distinction between the West and the East and as the beginning point for elaborate epics, theories, social descriptions, novels, and the various political accounts that relate to the Orient, their people, mind, customs, and destiny. Orientalism is a concept that dates back from the time of the Colonization of Arabs and the European Enlightenment (Sa’di, 2020). Orientalism presented a set of rationalization for Europe's colonies based on a history that is self-serving where the West had constructed the East to be very inferior and different, therefore in dire need of rescue through western intervention. Imagination, emphasis, and exaggeration of the Arabic culture by the western people point out to the general understanding of Orientalism. According to Edward Said, the essay will analyze the theoretical understanding of Orientalism and analyze various imageries that relate to the concept of Orientalism.
The Orient as a Western Discourse
Orientalism as a discourse of the West on the Orient, without doubt, legitimizes civilizing mission, expansionism, essentialism, and imperialism; however, it convinces the natives about their inferiority. Edwards Said demonstrates how literature and cultural canons of the westerns have otherized their misrepresentation of the Orient. Edward Said's book starts with a Karl Marx quote that "they are unable to represent themselves, thus ought to be represented." This is an assertion implying that the western career can represent them (Liangzhao et al. 2017). The relationship between knowledge and power is important in the postcolonial discourse on how this knowledge coming from different sources, European administrators, and orientalists reemployed colonial domination. Mostly influenced by Less Gramsci and Foucault, Edward began to elucidate the construction of the Orient by the West in different works like historical accounts, travelogues, official and state archives. According to Said, Oriental and Orient never exist; however, Westerners construct while also counterfeiting the Orient.
Edward Said is fully concerned about the information on the Orient defines structures of power. The information about the Orient stays in the control of the Westerners. Knowledge is never innocent but rather profoundly linked with operations relating to power. The power is the determinant of the reality of the West and the East. Since information to the Orient was crafted out of such cultural strength, in some sense, it generates the Oriental, the Orient, and his existence (Varisco, 2017). Edwards Said asserts that European information about the East goes hand in hand with exploration, expansionism, and settlement. Sa...