Orientalism

1)  Orientalism helps to create and shape entire new fields. It also used in English, history, anthropology, political science and cultural studies. It gives deep information of people of middle east people about their culture and behaviour. We come to know about them yet we never meet. Orientalism questions the reasons behind the impression of any community or nation as a bad and why the whole community and nation have to suffer because of the mistakes of one or two groups from that community.

2)  In Western Countries, the representation of East by media was in such a way that all western people were thinking about Eastern people as a Black magicians and mysterious people. They were not aware of the culture of East and that is why they have considered it as mysterious place, the word ‘mysterious’ itself creates the feeling or horror. So as a result the human side of Islamic and especially Arab world are rarely found in any Western country’s movies and in people’s mindset. Orientalism is the creates an image outside of history of something that is placid and still and eternal. Which is simply contradicted by the fact of history.

3)  Said’s analysis of Orientalism is not just a description of its content but a sustained argument for why it looks the way it does. it’s an examination of the quite concrete, historical and institution context that creates it. Specifically Said locates the construction of orientalism within the history of Imperial conquest.

4)  The difference between British and French Orientalism on the one hand and the American experience of the Orient on the other is that the American one is more indirect, much more based on abstractions’ in the past, British and Franch orientalism is direct and how the American Orientalism is indirect. It question the power system in terms of media, popular culture and globalization.

5)  Gramsci says, ‘therefore the task at the outset, is to try to compile an inventory’, in other words to try and make sense of it, and this seems to me to be the most interesting sort of human task. It’s a task of giving history some shape and sense, for a particular reason, not just to show that my history is better than your or my history is worse than yours. I am a victim and you are somebody who’s oppressed people or so on, but rather, to understand my history in terms of other people’s history, in other words to try to understand, to move beyond, to generalize one’s own individual experience to the experience of others and I think the great goal is in fact to become someone else.”