An Analysis of

Edward Said’s
Orientalism

Riley Quinn

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 CONTENTS

WAYS IN TO THE TEXT

Who Was Edward Said? 9
What Does Orientalism Say? 11
Why Does Orientalism Matter? 11

SECTION 1: INFLUENCES
Module 1: The Author and the Historical Context 14
Module 2: Academic Context 20
Module 3: The Problem 25
Module 4: The Author’s Contribution 30

SECTION 2: IDEAS
Module 5: Main Ideas 35
Module 6: Secondary Ideas 41
Module 7: Achievement 45
Module 8: Place in the Author’s Work 50

SECTION 3: IMPACT
Module 9: The First Responses 56
Module 10: The Evolving Debate 61
Module 11: Impact and Influence Today 68
Module 12: Where Next? 72

Glossary of Terms 78
People Mentioned in the Text 87
Works Cited 97

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 CRITICAL THINKING AND ORIENTALISM
Primary critical thinking skill: INTERPRETATION
Secondary critical thinking skill: ANALYSIS

Edward Said’s Orientalism is a masterclass in the art of interpretation

wedded to close analysis. Interpretation is characterized by careful
attention to the meanings of terms, by clarifying, questioning
definitions, and positing clear definitions. Combined with one of the
main sub-skills of analysis – drawing inferences and finding implicit
reasons and assumptions in arguments – it becomes a powerful tool for
critical thought.
In Orientalism, the theorist, critic and cultural historian Edward Said
uses interpretation and analysis to closely examine Western
representations of the “Orient” and ask what they are really doing, and
why. One of his central arguments is that Western representations of the
East and Middle East persistently define it as “other,” setting it up in
opposition to the West. Through careful analysis of a range of texts and
other materials, Said shows that implicit assumptions about the
“Orient’s” otherness underlie much Western thought and writing
about it. Clarifying consistently the differences between the real-world
East and the constructed ideas of the “Orient”, these interpretative
skills power his analysis, and provide the basis for an argument that has
proven hugely influential in literary criticism, philosophy, and even
politics.

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 ABOUT THE AUTHOR OF THE ORIGINAL WORK
The cultural critic and public intellectual Edward Said (1935–2003)
was born in Jerusalem, in what was then British-governed Palestine. He
was raised there and in Cairo, where his family moved following the
Arab-Israeli war of 1948. A brilliant student, Said concluded a somewhat
turbulent education with a PhD in English Literature at Harvard
University in 1964. Settling in the United States until his death, Said spent
the remainder of his academic career at Columbia University. His major
contribution to the humanities was his significant role in defining the field
of postcolonial studies.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR OF THE ANALYSIS

Riley Quinn holds master’s degrees in politics and international relations
from both LSE and the University of Oxford.

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 WAYS IN TO THE TEXT
KEY POINTS
• Edward Said was one of the most important cultural figures
of the late twentieth century and perhaps the key founder of
postcolonial studies.*
• Orientalism puts forward the idea that colonialism* is a way
to dominate a country, both politically and economically. The
book exposes the kind of thinking that helped colonialism
take root.
• By reading Said’s text, students will acquire an essential
framework that will help them to understand both
colonialism and postcolonial studies.

Who Was Edward Said?

Edward Said (1935–2003) was one of the most important cultural
critics of the late twentieth century. A Palestinian–American academic
and political activist, he pioneered the study of how empires*—
groups of countries ruled over by one state—developed and
functioned. Said’s work was so important that he is widely considered
to have founded the area of study called postcolonial theory.This field
tries to understand how and why colonized countries developed the
way they did in a postcolonial era.
Edward Said was born in 1935 in the British Mandate* of

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 Macat Analysis of Edward Said’s Orientalism

Palestine to a Palestinian mother and a Palestinian–American father.

He grew up in Jerusalem and then Cairo, where the family headed in
the aftermath of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.* Said was educated
mainly at top British and American schools, but things did not go
smoothly. After being expelled from Egypt’s Victoria College in 1951,
he was sent to an elite boarding school in Massachusetts in the United
States. Despite being unhappy there, Said’s intelligence shone through
and he moved on to study at prestigious Princeton University before
gaining his PhD in English Literature at Harvard University in 1964.
By this time he was already starting out on an academic career at
Columbia University in the department of English and Comparative
Literature.
Said’s Middle Eastern* background and status as an exile set him
apart from his colleagues. Western universities at the time were not
multicultural, and Said stood out for being both Arab and foreign. His
elite US private education meant, however, that he was both an
outsider and an insider, which gave him a different intellectual
perspective from his colleagues.While he clearly had a great respect for
the books he studied—even when he was criticizing them—Said was
able to look at Western literature and its links to imperial,* political,
and economic realities with a different eye.
Said spent his entire career at Columbia, from 1963 until his death
in 2003. His main achievement was in promoting and establishing
colonialism as an area of study in the humanities. Published in 1978,
Orientalism explored the impact of colonialism and Western
perceptions of countries that had been colonized. Said explored
similar themes in later books, such as Culture and Imperialism and
Covering Islam.
Edward Said became professor of English and comparative
literature in 1991, and played a huge part in shaping postcolonial
scholarship at Columbia. The university is still home today to a large
number of postcolonialist academics.

10

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 Ways In to the Text

What Does Orientalism Say?

Orientalism is a critique (analysis) of modern European colonialism.
The book argues that colonialism was not only a system of political
rule, but also an all-round worldview that simply believed the West
was superior to the East.
Said examined scholarly debates about Near Eastern* cultures,
especially those that were mainly Muslim. He then challenged
common Western assumptions about these colonized societies.
Because he was looking at academic debates, Said’s work in
Orientalism was designed to show that the academic world was closely
connected to the system of political power. Said was seeking to prove
that academics had, in effect, collaborated in the West’s domination of
the East.
Said argued that European colonialism was really about taking
advantage of colonized peoples’ labor and their resources, while
claiming that the Western colonial power was a “savior” helping these
societies to be more “modern” like Europe. This was easier for the
colonial power to do because it consistently categorized “the Orient”
through the use of degrading stereotypes.
Said wrote that this colonialist thinking did not go away when
colonial rule ended in the early twentieth century, but continued in
different forms.This was made easier when the United States emerged
as a huge global power and, according to Said, showed a clearly
“Orientalist” view of the world.
Said wanted academics—and society—to admit that racist,
colonialist ideas had been supported by Western academic thinking
and that the one depended on the other. His ideas were controversial,
but there is no doubt that these ideas have helped to change the way
colonialism is understood now.

Why Does Orientalism Matter?

Orientalism is a very important book that has had a wide influence,

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 Macat Analysis of Edward Said’s Orientalism

both in universities and in politics. It is a key text in postcolonial

studies and was considered revolutionary when it first appeared in
1978. Said shows how academic writing can be deeply connected to
the politics and workings of colonialism, and how the one fed the
other in order to justify the West’s self-imposed status as a superior
culture.According to Said, colonialism wasn’t just the act of colonizing
a particular place, it was an all-encompassing way of understanding the
world.
Orientalism laid out its arguments in an interdisciplinary* way,
breaking down boundaries between academic disciplines. In setting
out his arguments, Said covered everything from painting and
literature to travel and political writing. In this way the book influenced
many areas of study across the humanities and social sciences.As well as
bringing a brand new perspective to studies of colonialism, Said’s book
also challenged academics to look at their own ways of working. For
these important reasons Orientalism is still an extremely relevant book,
and continues to influence and direct scholarly work that looks to
understand society and culture.

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 SECTION 1
INFLUENCES

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 MODULE 1
THE AUTHOR AND THE
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
KEY POINTS
• When Orientalism was first published in 1978, Edward Said
was one of a very small number of Arab–American scholars
working at elite American universities. He was also one of
only a handful who had a deep interest in critically studying
modern European colonialism.*
• European colonialism had ended in all but a few parts of
the world at this time, but its long-term impact was still very
obvious.
• Orientalism appeared during a period of great tension
between the United States and the Arab world. This tension
brought many of the West’s historic anti-Arab and anti-
Muslim feelings to the surface.

Why Read This Text?

Edward Said’s Orientalism was published in the United States in 1978
and is a core text in the field of postcolonial studies* and critical
theory.* It looked at the West’s view of the Orient*—particularly
Arab and Muslim civilizations—through academic work, literature,
and art. It challenged stereotypical Western views of an Eastern world
and culture that was considered inferior. It wanted to show how the
world of academia in the West had supported these colonial views and
in so doing gave the political powers a kind of intellectual backing to
push forward with their colonialist strategies.
What was unusual about Orientalism when it first appeared was the
fact that it was written by someone who was working at the highest

14

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 Section 1: Influences; Module 1: The Author and the Historical Context

“whatMymade
own experiences of these matters are in part
me write this book … the life of an Arab
Palestinian in the West, particularly in America, is
disheartening.The web of racism, cultural stereotypes,
political imperialism,* [and] dehumanizing ideology
holding in the Arab or the Muslim is very strong
indeed.
”
Edward Said, Orientalism

level of US academia. Other notable anti-colonial* books, such as

Frantz Fanon’s* The Wretched of the Earth (1961)1 and Aimé Césaire’s*
Discourse on Colonialism (1955),2 were different, because they were
written by authors who were actually living under colonial rule.
Orientalism was published at a time of great social and political
change. By the late 1970s, the European imperial* powers had mainly
left their colonies and these countries had become independent
nations. It was very much a postcolonial world.TheVietnam War* had
ended in 1975, but some academics were still criticizing the US for a
foreign policy they saw as militaristic and aggressive. This foreign
policy was sometimes called “neocolonial,” because of the way it still
attempted to control other lands, but by means other than direct rule.
In 1972, an attack at the Munich Olympics, in which a Palestinian
group called Black September* had killed 11 Israeli Olympic athletes,
led to some anti-Arab feeling. Then, in 1973, Israel repelled an attack
on its territory by Syria and Egypt (the “Yom Kippur War”),* to some
extent thanks to military aid from the United States. The Organization
of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) retaliated by
cutting oil supplies to the West, triggering a worldwide economic
crisis. Americans were big consumers of Middle Eastern* oil and so
anti-Arab feelings in the US rose again, together with a general sense
in the US that Arab identity was linked to terrorist activity.

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 Macat Analysis of Edward Said’s Orientalism

Interestingly, though, awareness of the issue of race was growing in

American public life at this time. The civil rights movement* in the
1960s had fought for equal rights for African-Americans, and the end
of legal segregation in the South. This had transformed US politics.
Ordinary people were therefore asking questions and examining their
cultural perceptions.
All these political and social issues affected Said’s arguments and
the way Orientalism was received.

Author’s Life
Edward Said was an intellectual with a high public profile. His studies
and his politics were intimately linked. Orientalism’s arguments and
sense of addressing issues that were very much “of the moment” were
linked to Said’s experiences as an Arab living in the United States.
Said was born in the British Mandate* of Palestine in 1935, and
spent his childhood in Jerusalem. After the first Arab–Israeli War* in
1948, a large number of Palestinian Arabs were expelled from Israel.
Said’s family left for Cairo. There, Edward attended, first, the American
school and, later, Victoria College, which modeled itself on the elite
British public school system. When speaking about his experience at
Victoria College, Said emphasises its anglocentric nature above
everything else; in particular, how this environment marked linguistic,
cultural, and racial lines between students and teachers. Along with a
number of other students at the school, Said felt at home in two or
more languages, but only English was allowed to be spoken. Said and
his friends used their shared language as an act of defiance to what he
saw as an unjust imposition of imperial power. He was taught to think
like an English schoolboy, yet he was always made to feel like an
outsider: a non-European “other” who should know his place.
After finishing school, Said went to study in the United States,
obtaining a degree from Princeton University and a doctorate in
English literature from Harvard University. Said saw his school

16

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 Section 1: Influences; Module 1: The Author and the Historical Context

experience repeated at American universities, where again he felt like

an outsider. He found himself in an environment that was hostile to
Arabs,Arab ideas, and Arab nations, and this experience brought about
a major change in his thinking. Here, for the first time, he confronted
the paradox of his own identity. Because of his educational background,
Said was very familiar with the wealthy, white, and male world of elite
academia. Orientalism emerges out of this world, and attacks it from
within. It examines the ways that Western academia interacts with
political power to produce a particular world view. Said struggled to
maintain multiple identities within this world, so he began speaking as
a Palestinian again, but from within the system. In 1963 he joined the
English and comparative literature faculty at Columbia University,
and he stayed there until his death in 2003.
Said was fluent in Arabic, English, and French, and could read
Spanish, German, Italian, and Latin. His academic specialty was in the
area of modern European (mostly British) literature and literary
theory. However, his exile from his homeland—and the sense of
displacement and alienation this caused in him—was at the heart of
much of his work. Orientalism was written by a man who intimately
understood how the West looked at the Orient, and who therefore
could see how this distorted what the actual life of an “Oriental” was.

Author’s Background
Several different branches of philosophy influenced Said’s work and
led him to the conclusion that written works are always influenced by
the history and politics of the time in which they’re written. He was
particularly influenced by poststructuralist* philosophy, which
described how systems of thought and social organization are built
and put into place. The French philosopher Michel Foucault*
discusses concepts of power and discourse—the system of thoughts
that develop out of verbal interactions and then define how we
understand the world—in two important works, Discipline and Punish3

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 Macat Analysis of Edward Said’s Orientalism

and The Archaeology of Knowledge.4 Foucault particularly looked at how

power is underpinned by regulating what can be said, how it can be
said, and who can say it. Foucault’s work was crucial in forming Said’s
thinking when he wrote Orientalism.
Said wrote: “Texts can create not only knowledge, but also the very
reality they appear to describe. In time, such knowledge and reality
produce a tradition, or what Michel Foucault calls a discourse …”5
Said suggested that our modern thinking about the Orient* was
created by a power imbalance between Western Europe and the East
that existed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Orientalism says that European political power, and its academic
discourses, in fact produced a concept called the “Orient,” which is
based on rigid stereotypes and not on the actual cultures of the East. In
Said’s words: “Orientalism overrode the Orient* … an observation
about a tenth-century Arab poet multiplied itself into a policy towards
(and about) the Oriental mentality in Egypt, Iraq, or Arabia …
Orientalism assumed an unchanging Orient, absolutely different from
the West … [It] could never revise itself.”6
Said was also influenced by the work of Italian Marxist* and
political theorist Antonio Gramsci.* Gramsci developed a concept of
hegemony,* how one group can come to dominate another. Gramsci
looked at how Europe became industrialized in the late nineteenth
century and came to the conclusion that the bourgeois,* capitalist*
classes grabbed and held on to power not only through force, but also
through systems that made sure the working classes—the
proletariat*—somehow allowed themselves to be dominated. The
bourgeoisie deliberately put forward a worldview that suited them
with the express intention of making that view become “normal.”
When that view came to dominate, it meant that all classes in society
came to understand themselves from a bourgeois point of view. This
made it seem natural, as well as right, that the elite class dominated
everyone else, both economically and politically.

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 Section 1: Influences; Module 1: The Author and the Historical Context

In Orientalism, Said applies this same idea to colonial society, saying

that even after the imperial powers have left and have granted their
colonies independence, the colonialist intellectual standpoint and the
dominance of one group over another still remains.

NOTES
1 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington
(London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1965).
2 Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (London &
New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972).
3 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan
Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1975).
4 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan
Smith (London: Tavistock Publications, 1972).
5 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 94.
6 Said, Orientalism, 96.

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 MODULE 2
ACADEMIC CONTEXT
KEY POINTS
• Orientalism was crucial in helping found the field of
postcolonial studies,* the critical examination of the ways
nineteenth- and twentieth-century European colonialism*
shaped social, cultural, economic, and political structures
on a global level.
• At the time of Orientalism’s publication, many scholars had
written about the negative effects of European colonialism.
But no previous scholar had deeply analyzed where the
thinking behind colonialism had come from, how it had been
nurtured, or how that thinking was still having an influence.
• Orientalism drew on pre-existing critical theory* and anti-
colonial* thought to create a powerful analysis and critique
of European colonialism both as an ideology and as a real
system.

The Work in its Context

Edward Said’s Orientalism brought together two strands of thought:
anti-colonialism and critical theory. Anti-colonialism was typified by
the thoughts and works of Aimé Césaire* and Frantz Fanon,* who
both wrote from inside the colonized culture. It focused on the
political gap between the colonizer and the colonized. Critical theory
in the social sciences was at that time looking to move away from
simply descriptive analyses of systems. Scholars working in this area
wanted to develop approaches that would actually change the social
arrangements and belief systems that existed. Michel Foucault’s* ideas
about “discourses,”* or systems of knowledge and meaning, were an

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 Section 1: Influences; Module 2: Academic Context

“EastNo—no
*
person academically involved with the Near
Orientalist, that is—has ever in the United
States culturally and politically identified himself
wholeheartedly with the Arabs; certainly there have
been identifications on some level, but … all too
frequently they have been radically flawed by their
association with discredited political and economic
interests (oil-company and State Department Arabists,
for example) or with religion.
Edward Said, Orientalism
”
example of this. Orientalism drew on both these strands to form a
critique of colonialism that showed it to be both a system of rule and a
system of ideas.
Said set out to analyze European “Orientalist” work, both scholarly
and artistic. He showed how European Orientalist production was in
fact a whole system of knowledge. In other words, it could be seen as
one of Michel Foucault’s “discourses.” These discourses don’t just
provide information about a given subject, they also create the thing
they describe. So the Orientalist discourse both described “the East”
and created it. No Western representation or discussion of the East
could be free from the influence of colonial domination.

Overview of the Field

Orientalism was a product of early twentieth-century anti-colonialism.
This anti-colonial feeling was closely related to nationalist
independence movements that wanted to end European colonial rule
and allow countries to govern themselves. Frantz Fanon, Albert
Memmi* and Aimé Césaire all wrote their books while under
European imperial* rule and explored the “on the ground”
relationship between the colonizer and the colonized.They described

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 Macat Analysis of Edward Said’s Orientalism

the psychological and political damage that colonialism did to

everyone involved.
Edward Said was the first person to analyze European cultural
history from an “outsider” perspective. He wrote as a colonial, but he
was inside the Western Establishment. He used poststructuralist* ideas
for his analysis, basing his thinking on the notion that all knowledge is
created through different discourses and as such is unstable and
changing all the time. Approaching the subject of colonialism in this
way made Said one of the most important founders of postcolonial
studies.
Postcolonial studies are interdisciplinary* by nature, looking for
answers in all of the humanities and social sciences. Its scholars use
linguistics,* critical theory, cultural studies, history, and philosophy to
analyze how colonialism shaped colonized peoples as well as shaping
the Europeans who colonized them. Postcolonial studies focusing on
the Middle East* have looked at nineteenth-century books, articles,
and pamphlets written about the region to see how they reflect the
grand colonial project, that of ruling other regions. Seeing how
characters in novels behave or how Middle Eastern people are
described in travel guides shows how Europeans viewed “Orientals.”
This type of analysis is known as discourse analysis, and the process of
explaining how texts can reveal ideological standpoints comes from
the process of deconstruction,* which was developed by French
philosopher Jacques Derrida.*
Said’s view was that Western studies of the East were tied to
colonial rule itself and actually created colonialism. This was a new
way of looking at the subject.After World War II* area studies* became
popular. This strand of study focused on knowledge of the politics,
literature, economy, and culture of specific areas, such as Middle
Eastern Studies. Said saw this way of studying as a direct descendant of
colonial-era study and so was naturally dogged by the same type of
thinking. The world might have changed politically but, according to

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 Section 1: Influences; Module 2: Academic Context

Said, scholars still had a colonial mindset.

When writing Orientalism, Said was also influenced by the critical
theory of the Frankfurt School.* This group studied the ways that
capitalist* thinking was consistently reinforced in popular culture,
such as film, music, television, and even horoscopes. The Frankfurt
School believed that investigating culture in this way could reveal the
hidden workings of capitalist society.
Said didn’t entirely follow the Frankfurt School thinking, however.
Instead of unmasking and revealing the ways in which dominant
forces can subtly use books and music to control, Orientalism looked at
how literary texts and cultural knowledge actually are the power in
and of themselves. Because it exposes the system of thought,
Orientalism is more influenced by Michel Foucault.

Academic Influences
Western universities in the 1970s were mainly dominated by upper-
middle-class white men.1 In Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, this
meant that “the scholar” came from a very different background to
“the studied.” According to Said, this turned “the studied” into an
object that was looked at and analyzed, rather than individual people
who were perfectly capable of expressing themselves to others.
Some writers from colonized countries, and a few Western
thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre,* had written about anti-colonialism by
this time. But colonialism as a system was still not seriously studied in
the humanities. Disciplines such as English literature, philosophy, and
history each had strictly defined methods for study.
However, social scientists working in areas such as economics,
political science, and sociology were beginning to study both
colonialism and the political and economic effects of its collapse.
Scholars such as the sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein* were starting
to question theories of the 1950s and 1960s that stated economic
progress would happen everywhere in the world based on how things

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 Macat Analysis of Edward Said’s Orientalism

had evolved when Europe and America were first industrialized. The
development of a more complicated world with a global network of
different countries relying on each other for all sorts of different things
suggested that modernizing wouldn’t in fact be so straightforward.
Wallerstein talked, for example, about a world systems theory,* where
labor throughout the world would not be divided equally and where
some states would have all the skilled workers and others the more
manual low-paid workers.
It was in this climate that Said decided to look at European art,
literature, travel writing, and political writing by colonialist leaders in
its entirety. He also studied traditional Orientalist scholarly texts by the
likes of Louis Massignon,* Ernest Renan,* and Silvestre de Sacy* to
fully explore colonialism and to draw conclusions about it. Orientalism
boldly ignored boundaries and as such was a genuinely interdisciplinary
and innovative work.

NOTES
1 Said discusses the general character of American academia at this time
through key examples in his section on the latest phase of Orientalism.
See “Orientalism Now” in Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books,
1978), 285.

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 MODULE 3
THE PROBLEM
KEY POINTS
• The central questions that Orientalism addresses are: How
did the ideology and system of ideas that is the West’s study
of the East—what can be termed “Orientalism”—begin?
And how has it continued to the present day?
• Orientalism also asks how the Orientalist system of ideas
translated into a concrete, sustained political project.
• Edward Said largely created both the academic and the
popular debate about the origins, evolution, and long-term
effects of colonialism* as both a means of political rule and
as a system of thought.

Core Question
Edward Said’s main concern is to explore the relationship between
what the West wrote as a description and an explanation of the East
and what effect these writings had on colonial power in these
territories. It is a book that examined how the way the West described
the East led to the East actually becoming subservient.
The book addresses this idea by examining cultural texts from
both the period of colonial expansion and afterwards. As well as
looking at colonialism, the book analyzes how colonialist ideas are still
at work in contemporary global affairs.
Scholars were already studying colonialism when Said set out to
write Orientalism. But these were mainly sociologists and economists
who were concerned with investigating the postcolonial* economic
system and why there was financial inequality between the West and
the formerly colonized territories. Said was more interested in

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 Macat Analysis of Edward Said’s Orientalism

“of reality
[Orientalism was ultimately a political vision
whose structure promoted the difference
between the familiar (Europe, the West, ‘us’) and the
strange (the Orient, the East, ‘them’). This vision in
a sense created and then served the two worlds thus
conceived … The vision and material reality propped
each other up, kept each other going.
Edward Said, Orientalism
”
investigating how Western ideas and culture had created colonialism
in the first place. In a review of Orientalism, the anthropologist Talal
Asad* wrote that the book was an outstanding work because it tried
to analyze “the authoritative structure of Orientalist discourse—the
closed, self-evident, self-confirming character of that distinctive
discourse which is reproduced again and again.”1 In other words,
Western writings displayed an unshakable belief that it understood
this world completely and that all the conclusions it drew about the
East were plainly correct. Said was of the view that although
colonialism was to all intents and purposes dead, this attitude was still
very much alive.

The Participants
Said addressed a number of issues in Orientalism. That meant he
contributed to debates in different disciplines, and each debate had
different people taking part. Said looked at how certain fixed ideas—
and the way in which those ideas were expressed in Western culture—
helped shape the West’s ongoing views of the East. This thinking had
links to the work of the French philosophers Jacques Derrida* and
Michel Foucault* on language and ideas. Derrida suggested that what
scholars and politicians said about topics such as the Middle East*
both summed up their own view and influenced the views of others.2

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 Section 1: Influences; Module 3: The Problem

Foucault said that ideas expressed by scholars in discourses* set a

boundary beyond which others then could not go.3 In other words,
both Derrida and Foucault thought that discourse controlled the way
we see the world. Said took up this idea. He sought to show how
scholarly study of the East could first be affected by colonial ideologies
and would then in turn reproduce those ideologies.
Said drew on earlier anti-imperial* writing from colonies that had
been decolonized,* mainly by the French and the British, in the 1950s
and 1960s. Frantz Fanon,* a psychiatrist and writer from Martinique,
suggested in his books Black Skins,White Masks and The Wretched of the
Earth4 that European colonialism had done great psychological
damage to the people who had been colonized. Fanon believed that
because of their experiences these people had themselves started to
believe deep down that they actually were racially inferior. Fanon
suggested that the language and discourse of colonialism was powerful
enough to control not only political systems, but the way individuals
felt as well.
In The Colonizer and the Colonized,5 Tunisian writer Albert
Memmi* drew on his own experiences as a Tunisian Jew in the
French-controlled country. He examined the alienated role of the
“privileged minority”—natives who choose to deal with the colonial
government. Aimé Césaire’s* Discourse on Colonialism6 was a subtle
explanation of how colonialism works as a system of domination.The
Négritude* literary movement (black French-speaking thinkers who
rejected French colonialism) that Césaire helped found built on the
work of anti-colonial* writers from Africa and the Middle East to
South Asia.
Said was aware of others who had studied the history of Orientalist
thought. The French–Egyptian political thinker Anouar Abdel-
Malek* wrote as a Marxist,* saying that Europe’s economic need for
colonies formed the ways Europeans viewed the Middle East.Another
Marxist historian, Maxime Rodinson,* showed how the way Europe

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 Macat Analysis of Edward Said’s Orientalism

interacted with the colonies was narrow and dated.7 And both the
Palestinian historian A. L. Tibawi* and the English medievalist R. W.
Southern* had written histories of European ideas about the Middle
East, its people, and its history.8
Said, however, wanted his voice to be heard outside purely
scholarly debates. So Orientalism was published by a commercial
publisher. Said was keen for his view on Orientalism to be heard by
everyone at a time when the conflicts in the Middle East of the early
1970s were still fresh in people’s memories. While Orientalism was
responding to scholars, it was also a work that was rooted in the real
world of the time.

The Contemporary Debate

Said’s willingness to make major criticisms in his work set him apart
from other scholars, but he still acknowledged the importance of
earlier writers to what he was doing. Indeed, he dedicated Orientalism
to Ibrahim Abu-Lughod,* who had reshaped the story of Arab history
by showing how European ideas translated into Arab culture and how
Arab cultures then changed or rejected these ideas as part of their own
cultural development. Abu-Lughod wrote “counter-hegemonic”*
analyses of Middle East history. Those histories rejected the idea that
colonies were completely passive under imperial* power and simply
accepted their rule. If Arab cultures changed and rejected European
ideas, he pointed out, then the Arab colonies could not be passive in
the way Europeans had always thought they were. But Said went
further than Abu-Lughod, by looking at how the transformation of
European ideas affected the European colonialists themselves.
The Pakistani political scientist and writer Eqbal Ahmad* also
questioned Orientalism, but he looked at it in terms of economic
power. Ahmad investigated the way in which countries like France
and Britain misused their colonialist power to profit from their
colonies economically. They created economic growth in their own

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 Section 1: Influences; Module 3: The Problem

lands by abusing colonized people as a cheap workforce operating in

very poor conditions and by taking natural resources for themselves.9
In contrast to Ahmad, Said saw Orientalism more as a set of ideas that
came about because of political views. He did not focus on the
economic questions Ahmad examined. But he didn’t dismiss them
either. Said’s investigation of Orientalism went across a range of
different concerns, which made Orientalism a more complete
examination of the issues than anything that had come before.

NOTES
1 Talal Asad, “Review: Orientalism by Edward Said,” The English Historical
Review 95.376 (July 1980), 648–9.
2 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 1978).
3 Michael Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan
Smith (London: Tavistock Publications, 1972).
4 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington
(London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1965)
5 Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (London: The Orion Press,
1965).
6 Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (London &
New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972).
7 A. L. Tibawi, “Revue des études mohammediennes,” Revue historique 461
(1969): 169–220.
8 A. L. Tibawi, “English-speaking Orientalists: A Critique of Their Approach
to Islam and Arab Nationalism,” Islamic Quarterly 8 (1964): 25–45; R. W.
Southern, Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1962).
9 Carollee Bengelsdorf, Margaret Cerullo, and Yogesh Chandrani, eds., The
Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad, (New York: Columbia University Press,
2006).

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 MODULE 4
THE AUTHOR’S CONTRIBUTION
KEY POINTS
• Said was influenced by anti-colonial* thinking about
colonialism’s* impact and also by contemporary critical
theory* that looked at modern systems of thought. This
helped him put together a revolutionary argument about the
past, present, and future effects of colonialism worldwide.
• Said said that the end of colonial rule did not put an end to
colonial ways of thinking. In fact, this type of thinking was
still evident in many humanities disciplines, such as Middle
East* studies.
• Said’s belief that Western academic work had been
extremely important in developing the West’s entire
Orientalist worldview made some of his fellow academics
defensive, while others took another look at what they had
been doing.

Author’s Aims
Edward Said’s Orientalism changed its field. It merged critical theory
and intellectual history (the way major ideas have developed
historically) to trace how the Western imagination developed its ideas
about the Orient. Said wanted to outline both how scholars had built
up this idea of the East, and how the idea had developed over time. He
wanted to show how these views had been deeply linked to the
expansion of European colonial power across the world. He did this by
combining literary criticism and analysis to understand how
Orientalist discourse* became a “carrier” of colonialist ideas and
attitudes. So the book deliberately politicized the way we look at

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 Section 1: Influences; Module 4: The Author’s Contribution

“ [Orientalism’s] outstanding contribution lies in

its attempt to analyze the authoritative structure of
Orientalist discourse—the closed, self-evident, self-
confirming character of that distinctive discourse which
is reproduced again and again.
”
Talal Asad,* “Review: Orientalism by Edward Said,” English Historical Review

literary and artistic work in this area. This is Said’s key academic
innovation. Debates in postcolonial* and cultural studies will now
often start with a look at how things are represented in texts, in images,
and in sound.
Said also set his work apart by providing evidence from lots of
different text sources, from scholarly works in history and anthropology
right through to novels and poetry.
Orientalism is at its heart a history of how cultures represent
things, in this case how Europe depicts the East. Orientalism describes
the Western view of the Orient* as “ignorant but complex.”According
to Said, this construction of a view of the East exists and reinforces
itself according to its own internal logic.1 The section of the book
called “Orientalism Now” describes the Orient that appears as “a
system of representations framed by a whole set of forces that brought
the Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness, and later,
Western empire.*”2
Orientalism’s main aim was to investigate how this “system of
representations” combines to create a vision where a strange,
unchanging, and inferior “Orient” is compared to a modern and
superior “Occident”* (the West).

Approach
Said’s argument has three parts. His first theme is “The Scope of
Orientalism.” This section of the book looks at the boundaries of

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 Macat Analysis of Edward Said’s Orientalism

Orientalist representation through geography and across time. His

second theme is “Orientalist Structures and Restructures.” Here Said
looks at the images, the interests, and the institutions that Orientalist
scholarship helped to shape. The third section of Said’s book,
“Orientalism Now,” analyzes the shift in Orientalist thinking that
happened after World War I.*
Said’s argument is mainly theoretical. He wasn’t looking to make
specific factual claims, but wanted to explain the ways in which the
West’s image of the East had been created. He wanted to show the
various combining elements that made this view possible and
encouraged it to flourish.
Said brought together theories and ideas from many writers and
academic disciplines, and was inspired by philosophers like the
Frenchmen Michel Foucault* and Jacques Derrida.* Their ideas
about how to analyze discourse formed the basis of Said’s own
approach and allowed him to show how representations of the Orient
were full of implied meanings.

Contribution in Context
Orientalism is an analysis that investigates many different areas in order
to understand how politics—and colonialism in particular—influences
works of culture and scholarship that are supposedly “objective” and
“pure.”
Said saw the way the Orient* is perceived as an imaginary view
that had been constructed by Western Europe so that it could justify
and then impose economic and political control of other lands. This
was a new idea, at least on the systematic and cross-regional scale that
Said suggested it happened.
Said was not particularly interested in pointing out individual
instances of stereotyping or generalizing. Rather, he studied the ways
in which those instances had evolved and helped colonizers to take
political, economic, and social control.This was radically different from

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 Section 1: Influences; Module 4: The Author’s Contribution

how “Oriental” societies had been studied up till then with Western
scholarship’s focus on “area studies.” Those “areas”—the Middle East
and South, Central, and Southeast Asia—were terms, Said argued, that
grew from a colonial vision.
Said suggested that the terms themselves were closely tied to Cold
War* American political interests, and he discusses this relationship at
length in his book’s closing chapter, “Orientalism Now: The Latest
Phase.”3 In “explaining” those politically important areas for what was
assumed to be a Western audience, area studies often used familiar
Orientalist stereotypes. So it was common for Islam to be portrayed as
somehow backward and not interested in progress, and for Oriental
societies to be described as unchanging and mysterious to the West.
Because Orientalism was Said’s first major academic publication, it
can be seen as the important first step in the author’s career as a high-
profile public intellectual. Said would return to the ideas he put
forward in Orientalism later in his career. His book Culture and
Imperialism applied his theories on colonialism to European cultural
works, examining the way in which colonialism was openly explained
in the Western world, as well as the way that ideas on Orientalism were
implied.Whereas Orientalism primarily dealt with Orientalist scholarly
works, Culture and Imperialism looked at how Orientalist ways of
thinking appeared in great European literary works by writers such as
Jane Austen,* William Butler Yeats,* and Joseph Conrad.*
Said’s later political and academic work about Palestinian identity
and independence also drew on the ideas in Orientalism, looking at the
ways in which racist, colonial portrayals of Arab ethnicity still
influenced modern Western treatment of the Palestinians.

NOTES
1 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 55.
2 Said, Orientalism, 202–3.
3 Said, Orientalism, 284–328.

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 SECTION 2
IDEAS

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 MODULE 5
MAIN IDEAS
KEY POINTS
• Said argues that Orientalism is a system of thought that
casts the West as superior and the East as inferior, and so
justifies the West’s domination of the East.
• Orientalism says that the Western view of the East is a
fantasy of a world that is unchanging and exotic, and one
that bears little resemblance to the complex reality.
• Because this is a subject that was very personal to him
as an Arab and as an intellectual working in the university
system, Said makes his arguments openly and forcefully,
setting out his ideas clearly at the beginning of the book and
then developing those ideas consistently throughout.

Key Themes
Edward Said’s central concerns in Orientalism are power, how people
and countries are represented in cultural and academic work, and how
Western European thinking actually helped create the Orient* as it
was. For Said, the term “Orient” does not refer to a concrete place or
culture, but to an intellectual idea, an invented concept of a way of life
that was created to be the total opposite of European civilization.
Once this idea had been constructed, European colonial powers could
then define themselves in direct contrast to their colonies—as rational
rather than emotional and as civilized rather than barbaric. Said writes
that Western academics played an important part in the creation of this
Oriental stereotype, and that they helped to create a “Western style for
dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.”
“European culture,” he added, “gained in strength and identity by

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 Macat Analysis of Edward Said’s Orientalism

“Orientalist
My thesis is that the essential aspects of modern
theory and praxis (from which present-
day Orientalism derives) can be understood, not as
a sudden access of objective knowledge about the
Orient,* but as a set of structures inherited from the
past, secularized,* redisposed, and re-formed by such
disciplines as philology, which in turn were naturalized
[and] modernized.
Edward Said, Orientalism
”
setting itself off against the Orient* as a sort of surrogate and even
underground self.”1

Said sets out his thesis in terms of:

• textuality* (the characteristic of a text that communicates meaning)
• geographic-temporal imagination* (the idea that a place or a type
of people can exist not only in reality, but as a made-up idea that
is based around shared geography and history and is then built on
with stories)
• the clear links between Orientalist scholarship and Western
domination.

His argument operates on two levels: one examines Orientalist

cultural works with an emphasis on content; the other explains the
political dynamics that made Orientalism possible. The Palestinian–
American anthropologist Nadia Abu El Haj* suggests that “Orientalism
sought not just to map out a particular discursive formation* but, just
as crucially, to elaborate on how that discursive formation articulated
with state power—its institutions, its economic and military imperial*
projects.”2
In effect, Orientalism was written to show that Western Oriental

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 Section 2: Influences; Module 5: Main Ideas

studies did not analyze the East in an objective fashion, but instead
“created” an East that, in fact, deserved to be under imperial control.

Exploring the Ideas

Orientalism moves across time and across academic disciplines, but the
book remains tightly organized around a central set of problems. Said
uses an extended Introduction to outline the text’s central aims: to
examine the intellectual development of Orientalism both as a
discipline and as a category, and to show the ways in which it helped
create the colonial project. In the chapter, “Imaginative Geography
and its Representations: Orientalizing the Oriental,” Said describes
the fantasy of the Orient that scholars developed. Geography, in the
Orientalist imagination, becomes linked to a place in time.The Orient
appears to “alternate in the mind’s geography between being an Old
World to which one returned, as to Eden or Paradise … and being a
wholly new place to which one came … in order to set up a New
World.”3
What Said is suggesting is that the East represents a “less evolved”
stage of civilization—so much so that it appears to exist in a wholly
different world and time. This is a common view and can be seen
when romantic descriptions of the East describe it as the source of the
mystical or religious roots of civilization. All this, Said argues, was
useful in helping the West justify European colonialism.* It made it
possible for the West to claim that its presence was needed so that the
East could reform, rebuild, and somehow find itself again.This view, of
course, assumed that the ability to make such changes was something
the Oriental himself was not equipped to do.
As a second major theme, Said emphasizes the difference between
what he called “latent” Orientalism and “manifest” Orientalism.This is
an important aspect of his thinking.
“Latent” Orientalism, in Said’s view, is the beliefs and assumptions
that underpin Western Orientalist study. The most important of these

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is the belief that the West is quite simply superior to the East: more
civilized and more rational. This view was born out of Western study
and then spread outwards to lay the groundwork for, and then actually
enable, colonial rule. This view of Western superiority justified an
ongoing Western presence—both scholarly and political—in the
Orient. By saying that the civilization of the West was superior to that
of the East, it allowed the West to justify the idea that the East should
be “studied” and that the West could intervene in the East whenever it
saw fit.This meant that the East becomes a place that has things done
to it, rather than doing things itself. Static and without its own history,
this Orient is at best just a container for the glories of ancient
civilizations. And these civilizations somehow need the West to help
reestablish them.
“Manifest” Orientalism, on the other hand, is a physical,
institutional presence: it can be found in university departments,
cultural works, and the structures of government behind colonial rule.
Put together, these two forms of Orientalism define a discourse,*
an exchange of thoughts and ideas between East and West. However, it
is manifest Orientalism—and the connections between the latent and
the manifest—that forms the core of Said’s argument. He sets out the
idea that while latent Orientalism does not change very much over
time, the concrete examples of manifest Orientalism in action do
change according to political and economic circumstances:4
“The distinction I am making is really between an almost
unconscious (and certainly untouchable) positivity, which I shall call
latent Orientalism, and the various stated views about Oriental society,
languages, literatures, history, sociology, and so forth, which I shall call
manifest Orientalism. Whatever change occurs in knowledge of the
Orient is found almost exclusively in manifest Orientalism; the
unanimity, stability, and durability of latent Orientalism are more or
less constant.”5
Said’s third theme discusses how the West comes to know the East.

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 Section 2: Influences; Module 5: Main Ideas

He sees Orientalism from the eighteenth century onwards as part of a

more general cultural shift towards secular and scientific rationalism,
i.e. a world less concerned with religious matters and based more on
reason. From this viewpoint the world is a place of chaos, a place that
needs to be brought under control and categorized. He writes that
“the specific intellectual and institutional structures of modern
Orientalism” rely on four currents of thought in eighteenth-century
culture:“expansion, historical confrontation, sympathy, classification.”6
Said suggested that scholars of the time had therefore decided that the
Orient was a place that needed to be tamed, understood, and
eventually brought back to good health through “scientific” study and
the “help” of the West.
It is here that Said gives evidence of Orientalist scholarship
justifying the need for empire* ahead of actual colonization. For Said,
Western knowledge about the Orient is information that is gathered
and organized specifically in order to gain future political and
economic control over that region. Similarly, the Western desire to
classify everything Oriental “properly” leaves no room for things to
vary, change, or develop; the Orient becomes nothing more than a
passive, static object that can be investigated, shaped, and then acted
on. In short, it becomes an object that can be colonized.

Language and Expression

Orientalism is a powerful book, not least because Said is so personally
involved with its subject matter. The political urgency in his writing
flows from his own experiences in the British colonies and the United
States.“Much of the personal investment in this study derives from my
awareness of being an ‘Oriental’ as a child growing up in two British
colonies,” he writes.“The web of racism, cultural stereotypes, political
imperialism, dehumanizing ideology holding in the Arab or the
Muslim is very strong indeed … The nexus of knowledge and power
creating ‘the Oriental’ and in a sense obliterating him as a human

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being is therefore not for me an exclusively academic matter.”7

Said looks to show that the Orientalist academic is defined by a
deep sense of detachment and “otherness.” His job is to dispassionately
interpret “alien” cultures to a European audience. In contrast, Said was
open and unapologetic about his own experience and identity, and
how this affected his academic work. This attitude clearly challenged
the notion of “objectivity” that was believed to be essential in order for
scholars to be seen as credible in the Western world of academia, and,
according to Said, even more so in the field of Orientalism.
Said’s argument is generally set out in a clear, eloquent, and forceful
manner. He does use some conceptual and academic language that
may be hard to understand at first, but this is a deliberate tactic. His aim
in publishing the book was to produce a strong critique of colonialism
(and to imply the systemic racism that lay behind it), for a Western
academic audience.This audience was often hostile to such ideas. Said
used academic language as a way of speaking directly to this audience.
But he also wrote in a way that interested readers could generally
understand, meaning that the book became popular both in academic
circles and with a much wider audience.

NOTES
1 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 3.
2 Nadia Abu El Haj, “Edward Said and the Political Present,” American
Ethnologist 32, no. 4 (November 2004), 548.
3 Said, Orientalism, 58.
4 Said, Orientalism, 222–4.
5 Said, Orientalism, 206.
6 Said, Orientalism, 120.
7 Said, Orientalism, 27.

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 MODULE 6
SECONDARY IDEAS
KEY POINTS
• Edward Said’s primary ideas lay out his big thinking
about Orientalism and the political, economic, and social
conditions that brought it about. His secondary ideas detail
the particular stereotypes attached to the Orient in the
Orientalist’s view.
• The stereotypes of Orientalism that Said identifies
include: seeing the Oriental as fundamentally alien and
“Other;” viewing the Orient as representing aspects of
European society (particularly emerging aspects born out
of industrialization) that upper-class Europeans feared and
wished to reject; and regarding the Orient as “feminine”
(meaning weak and in need of help and direction) in the
Victorian, European sense.
• Of his secondary ideas, Said’s most important concept is
that of the Oriental as someone “Other,” someone who
represents the complete opposite of the West.

Other Ideas
Edward Said’s main ideas in Orientalism deal with the ways in which
the academic disciplines researching the Orient were totally associated
with exerting political power in the colonies. His secondary ideas
explain how Orientalism showed itself in European cultural
productions such as books, articles, and pamphlets. Said identifies the
core beliefs about the Orient and Oriental people that underpin
Orientalism as a field of study. These core beliefs then underpin the
whole colonial* project.

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 Macat Analysis of Edward Said’s Orientalism

“human
The very possibility of development, transformation,
movement—in the deepest sense of the word—
is denied the Orient* and the Oriental. As a known and
ultimately an immobilized or unproductive quality, they
come to be identified with a bad sort of eternality.
Edward Said, Orientalism
”
Said pays particular attention to the sub-disciplines that he believes
are central to Orientalist discourse,* namely philology—the study of
written language, blending history and linguistics*—and anthropology,
the study of culture.
Orientalism develops a powerful central argument, but its secondary
ideas are skillfully woven into the work’s broader scope. These ideas
help to flesh out the bigger argument concerning the political power
that Orientalism seeks to justify and sustain.
The book also incorporates a structure behind its arguments that is
based on the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault.*
Foucault’s interest was in analyzing discourses—the written
information that builds up around how a subject is treated throughout
a culture. Discourse analysis is a vital part of Said’s approach. Being
able to analyze texts using this technique allowed Said to explore the
issues in a methodical way and back his ideas up with evidence.

Exploring the Ideas

Said’s most important secondary idea was to show how common
Orientalist stereotypes always positioned an Oriental as an object and
a European as someone who was questioning, interpreting, and
somehow rescuing them. In Said’s words: “To be a European in the
Orient always involves being a consciousness set apart from, and
unequal with, its surroundings.”1 The Oriental person is portrayed as
impenetrable, overly religious, and completely different from the

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 Section 2: Influences; Module 6: Secondary Ideas

Westerner. This creates a sense of distance. Said uses the story of the
British colonial bureaucrat gone “native” T. E. Lawrence*—also
known as “Lawrence of Arabia”—to show that even in this situation
the Orient is created as nothing more than a stage where Western male
“heroism” can be played out in dramatic fashion.
Stripped of humanity and all its complexity, the Oriental became a
blank canvas for any identity a Westerner might choose.The Oriental
was seen as somehow naturally backward, against modernity, morally
depraved, and likely to do things to excess. Indeed, an Oriental was
often compared to and explicitly associated with degenerate people.
As Said explains: “The Oriental was linked to elements in Western
society (delinquents, the insane, women, the poor) having in common
an identity best described as lamentably alien … Orientals were …
analyzed not as citizens, or even people, but as problems to be solved or
confined or … taken over.”2
In this view, the Orient can be seen as a projection of European
social anxieties at the dawn of a new age—the modern age of industrial
capitalism.* This was a time when social structures in the West were
undergoing massive changes, and issues such as urban poverty and
overpopulation, and the public health crises that came with them,
began to emerge. Prompted by the publication of Charles Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species in 1859, ideas about evolution also informed
Orientalist thought and placed the East as fundamentally backward in
terms of scientific progress and human history.
Said also briefly discusses the strong sexual undertones that are
present in this attitude. He identifies the often erotic tone found in the
prose of Orientalist writers as a way of associating the Orient with a
Victorian viewpoint of femininity. This view saw females— and
therefore the Orient itself—as fundamentally weak, incapable of
thinking or acting for themselves or itself, seductive by nature, yet
passive, and inviting male intervention and penetration.
Said talks about this at great length in his discussion of French

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 Macat Analysis of Edward Said’s Orientalism

novelist Gustave Flaubert’s* writings on the Orient.According to Said

these writings showed “an almost uniform association between the
Orient and sex.”3 The Orient, then, is a kind of male fantasy object,
with the Orientalist “hero” being allowed to transform his sexual
desire into enlightenment for the Orient. The Orient’s supposedly
feminine weakness actively invites “benevolent” paternalism* from
the white European male.

Overlooked
Orientalism is the foundational text of postcolonial studies* in Western
academia. But it has reached far beyond this particular environment
and has gone on to become a world classic.Translated into more than
36 languages, it has been fiercely debated, dissected, and expanded on
for decades.
As a result, there are no areas of the work that have been clearly
neglected. Critics and scholars have examined, discussed, and drawn
from many individual aspects of the text. However, Said’s original
arguments have often been lost in the highly politicized controversy
that surrounded the author as a public intellectual. This became a
more important factor after Said started to get more involved in the
Israeli–Palestine issues* in the late 1980s.

NOTES
1 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 157.
2 Said, Orientalism, 207.
3 Said, Orientalism, 188.

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 MODULE 7
ACHIEVEMENT
KEY POINTS
• Edward Said was successful in achieving his aims:
Orientalism and the debate that followed established
colonialism* as a field of serious and active scholarly study.
• Orientalism was published at a key moment in world politics:
While European colonialism had for the most part ended,
it had become very clear by the late 1970s that it had
totally shaped the global economic, political, and cultural
landscape. In many cases this had not been a good thing.
• Orientalism’s originality increased its impact in certain ways
and limited it in others: Since Said’s argument was fairly
new, many initial reactions failed to take into account his
more subtle and complex ideas.

Assessing the Argument

Orientalism largely succeeded in what it set out to do. It aimed to
encourage a debate about colonialism and bring about an era of
postcolonial studies.* The book had a methodology and framework
for examining imperialism—and afterwards it was used by scholars to
produce more investigations into colonial and postcolonial culture.
Said’s work provided a worldview and vocabulary that could
potentially be used to destabilize white Euro–American supremacy
outside the university system. Perhaps more subtly, though, Orientalism
also inspired a trend towards reflection and internal criticism within the
disciplines of the humanities and social sciences. The book prompted
scholars to look at their own approach to the subject dispassionately. It
also made them question what was being produced in academic circles

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 Macat Analysis of Edward Said’s Orientalism

“discursive
Orientalism sought not just to map out a particular
formation but, just as crucially, to elaborate
*
on how that discursive formation articulated with
state power—its institutions, its economic and military
imperial* projects.
”
Nadia Abu El Haj,* “Edward Said and the Political Present,” American
Ethnologist

on the subject of formerly colonized peoples and how those works

could reinforce old colonial power relationships.
Said argued that there were still very clear examples of the tight
relationship between academic scholarship in the West and Western
countries still being able to exert political influence over people who
had once been colonized. He said this was particularly evident in area
studies* scholarship. Said discusses this idea at length in the final
section of Orientalism.1 According to him, area studies as a discipline
divides the world into regions using colonial categories (for example,
the “Middle East”* and “Near East”*), and then produces knowledge
that tries to “explain” politically important non-Western societies to
Euro-American governments.
People continue to debate and engage with Orientalism. It could
be said that Said’s analysis is more important than ever in the post-
9/11* world. Certain Middle Eastern countries where Muslims are in
the majority have had Western military forces on the ground. The
debate among the general Western population, meanwhile, is certainly
colored by the Orientalist worldview.

Achievement in Context
Orientalism appeared in 1978 at an important time in the relationship
between the West and the East as conflict was rife. This helped it to
reach a wider audience, but also hindered useful interpretations of

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 Section 2: Influences; Module 7: Achievement

the book.
University scholars in relevant areas were generally not very
interested in ideas of colonialism and how colonized countries were
represented and they reacted badly to any suggestion that they might
not be objective. Critical analysis of colonialism that did exist tended
to focus on economics and social sciences such as sociology, rather
than on culture.
Following recent international events there was also a wave of
anti-Islamic feeling in the United States and Western Europe. This
brought the tension between the West on the one hand and the Arab
and Muslim East on the other out into the open. The Iranian
Revolution* of 1979 raised these tensions to fever pitch.This volatile
political climate meant that Orientalism received a lot of attention from
both academics and the general public. It sparked fierce debate and
some people were quick to condemn the work.
The publication of Orientalism also coincided with a growing
disillusionment with postcolonial rule. From 1945 to 1970 there had
been a sense of real optimism among newly independent former
colonies. But the 1980s saw the rise of dictators like Idi Amin* in
Uganda and Robert Mugabe* in Zimbabwe. And there was both a
widespread economic crisis and growing poverty in many former
colonies. These factors led to a re-examination of the process of
decolonization* as people questioned what had been gained.
These factors contributed to the widespread attention Orientalism
received. They also helped to spread Said’s ideas throughout the
academic world and among the general public. The book was
controversial and so became a lightning rod for attracting both praise
and criticism, in ways that often failed to take into account the
subtleties of Said’s arguments.
But because Orientalism was talked about so much, it did inspire
many people to think about colonialism. The significant postcolonial
scholarship the book inspired proves the point.

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 Macat Analysis of Edward Said’s Orientalism

Limitations
Orientalism is intentionally limited in its scope. It is solely concerned
with what was relatively recent European colonialism. So the book is
deeply rooted in its geographic and historical context, and concerns
itself with a specific epistemology,* or theory of knowledge, and a
specific set of historical processes.
Some scholars have questioned Said’s dependence on French
philosopher Michel Foucault’s* concepts of discursive formation*
(the type of written, spoken, or performed communication that forms
the basis of analysis) and disciplinary power* (the way a dominant
group exerts its authority over a dominated group) in analyzing
materials.
The attention Said gave to a few Orientalist thinkers doesn’t truly
fit in with Foucault’s firm ideas about discourse* analysis. Foucault
saw power as absolute, and believed it would work its way into all
knowledge. This meant that Foucault thought that discourses could
not be avoided or changed by any one writer. To Foucault, the
individual is totally irrelevant in discourse analysis. Said drew heavily
from this concept of discourse, but then he focused on just a few
individual authors. His argument was that the writers he looked at
were representative of all Orientalist thinkers, and that they did, in fact,
change Orientalism as a discipline.
Said himself accepted that this was a problem of sorts. He wrote in
an afterword:“Orientalism is a partisan book, not a theoretical machine
... The interest I took in Orientalism as a cultural phenomenon ...
derives from its variability and unpredictability … What I tried to
preserve in my analysis of Orientalism was its combination of
consistency and inconsistency, its play, so to speak.”2 Any reader of the
text has to accept that there is some intellectual tension between two
theoretical notions: humanism* (where humans have the power to
affect systems of thought) and Foucault’s idea of power.

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NOTES
1 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 284–328.
2 Said, Orientalism, 339–40.

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 MODULE 8
PLACE IN THE AUTHOR’S WORK
KEY POINTS
• Said published a great deal of work on colonialism,*
postcolonialism,* and contemporary global politics,
particularly focusing on the Middle East.* Orientalism is
considered his greatest work. It is his most influential book
and the one for which he is most famous.
• Orientalism contained Said’s key ideas and views on
colonialism and postcolonialism. These ideas had their roots
in his previous work and would continue to be important to
him throughout his career.
• Orientalism is a very personal book, reflecting Said’s own
experiences as well as his academic concerns.

Positioning
In his long and varied career, Edward Said concentrated mainly on
colonialism and its legacies. He wanted to understand and dismantle
racist, colonialist mental frameworks, and explore what he saw as more
human alternatives.This was his project from the very beginning of his
career.
Said’s first book, published in 1966, looked at the Polish–British
author Joseph Conrad.* Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography1
discussed Conrad’s anxieties about his own life and identity and how
he wrote about the past in his novels. Said felt there was a clear
connection between the two. He uses Conrad as a way to represent a
larger crisis of the European sense of self when faced with a modern,
industrialized world.
After writing a book called Beginnings: Intentions and Method about

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“reality
Can one divide human reality, as indeed human
seems to be divided, into clearly different
cultures, histories, traditions, societies, even races, and
survive the consequences humanly? By surviving the
consequences humanly, I mean to ask whether there
is any way of avoiding the hostility expressed by the
division, say, of men into ‘us’ (Westerners) and ‘they’
(Orientals).
”
Edward Said, Orientalism

the intellectual origins of literary theory in 1975,2 Said published

Orientalism in 1978. The Question of Palestine followed a year later. In
1981, two years after the Iranian Revolution*, came the Iran hostage
crisis, where 52 American diplomats and citizens were held hostage by
students in the American Embassy in the capital Tehran. In the same
year Said published Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts
Determine How We See the Rest of the World,3 in which he argued that
contemporary representations of Muslims continued the old colonial
discourses about the Orient.
In Culture and Imperialism, published in 1993, Said looked at both
Western artistic and scholarly production and Euro–American
imperialism.* The book contained some of Said’s most important
examinations of Western literature and empire,* including discussions
on Joseph Conrad, Jane Austen,* and William Butler Yeats.*
Freud and the Non-European,4 published in 2003, built on Said’s
work on Western psychologies, identity, and modernity as he further
investigated political and cultural identity. Here Said connected the
Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud’s* important book Moses and
Monotheism5 to modern Middle Eastern politics to suggest it might be
possible to build political and cultural identity in a different way.

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 Macat Analysis of Edward Said’s Orientalism

Orientalism aside, Said is perhaps best known for his involvement

with Palestine and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict,* not only as a
scholar but also as an activist. While he obviously had a personal
interest in this issue, Said also saw this conflict as being clearly
connected to the bigger issues of European colonialism and how it
had affected world politics in general. He wrote four books on the
subject of Palestine.The first of these, The Question of Palestine6 is a key
text offering a detailed analysis of modern Palestine and the Palestinian
people. One of its most important chapters, “Zionism from the
Standpoint of its Victims,” was even published separately as an article.7
In addition, The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian
Self-Determination, 1969–1994,8 details the history of both the
Palestinian people (inside and outside Israel) and the Palestinian
Territories in the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War.* In 1986 Said
collaborated with the photographer Jean Mohr * to produce After the
Last Sky. This book explored in words and images how it felt to be a
displaced, exiled Palestinian. Said’s most personal autobiographical
work—Out of Place: A Memoir9—appeared in 1999 and describes his
own experience of exile growing up as a Palestinian in Jerusalem, then
Egypt, and eventually in the United States.

Integration
As Said’s academic background was in English literature, most of his
work is classed as literary analysis or cultural studies. In his 1966 book
Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, for example, Said
investigates Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness. He analyzes how Conrad
used the East as a kind of theatre where Europeans could try to play
out and understand their own psychological issues. Conrad’s Orientals
appear as part of the backdrop to his work or as foils, but they are never
the principal characters.10
Said’s work has a wide range and can’t be fitted neatly into one
category. This can be seen in Orientalism, which was an

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interdisciplinary* book drawing on many different areas of study. Said

intended it to break down barriers that limited perception and
thought, and hoped that his work could contribute to change
Orientalist discourses. As his career progressed, Said became better
known for his political writings on Palestine and on popular Western
representations of the Middle East. His view that colonialism was a
deeply engrained system of thought and a tangible form of domination
had a wide impact on people’s understanding and views of the Israeli–
Palestinian conflict.11

Significance
Orientalism had a major impact on all scholarly work that dealt with
colonialism. Said’s ideas were a direct challenge to his fellow academics
and they drew together several strands of thought that had not been
fully considered until then.This meant that the book has had a lasting
impact on both how the East is studied and how it is understood.
Orientalism is also significant in Said’s career and can easily be
considered as his master work. It certainly cemented his public
reputation as an important scholar of cultural studies. Orientalism also
helped to inspire critical re-evaluations in the fields of history,
anthropology, and literature, while also causing a great deal of
controversy. All this makes it reasonable to see Orientalism as Edward
Said’s single most important contribution to the study of colonialism
and its aftereffects.

NOTES
1 Edward Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1966).
2 Edward Said, Beginnings: Intentions and Method (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1985).
3 Edward Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine
How We See the Rest of the World (New York: Vintage Books, 1997).
4 Edward Said, Freud and the non-European (London: Verso, 2003).

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5 Sigmind Freud, Moses and Monotheism (London: Hogarth Press, 1939).

6 Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
7 Edward Said, “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims,” Social Text No. 1
(1979), 7–58.
8 Edward Said, The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian
Self-Determination 1969–1994 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994).
9 Edward Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (New York: Knopf, 1999).
10 Said, Joseph Conrad.
11 Said, Question of Palestine.

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 SECTION 3
IMPACT

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 MODULE 9
THE FIRST RESPONSES
KEY POINTS
• Because it is a highly political work with a clear political
viewpoint, each critic’s own political views, particularly with
regard to issues of race, ethnicity, and colonialism,* shaped
their reaction to Orientalism.
• Some critics felt that Orientalism was misrepresented in the
book, claiming it was not a discipline that was intimately
connected to the political project of colonialism.
• Other critics argued that Said failed to take into account the
complexities of the colonial relationship.

Criticism
Orientalism ignited a storm of controversy, because it was a work that
took direct critical aim at the Western academic world—both
historically and in the present day. Critics of the work fell broadly into
two groups. The first consisted mostly of academic Orientalists
defending their field against Edward Said’s criticisms.
The second group was more generally sympathetic to Said’s point
of view, but critical of his use of theory. Several scholars in both camps
analyzed the scope and choice of Said’s material, noting the fact that
he didn’t look at East and South Asia in his work. Nor did he examine
German, Dutch, and Russian Orientalist scholarship. Said openly
acknowledged these criticisms, but still defended his decision to focus
his studies on the Islamic “Near East”* and to British and French
scholarship.
They also objected to Said’s view of Western studies of Orientalism,
saying it was both too rigid and inaccurate. Bernard Lewis,* professor

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“the What imperial purpose was served by deciphering

*
ancient Egyptian language, for example, and then
restoring to the Egyptians knowledge of and pride in
their forgotten, ancient past?
Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West
”
emeritus of Islamic history at Princeton University and one of the
most influential Western scholars of the Middle East,* published a
scathing review of Orientalism in the NewYork Review of Books.This led
to a frank exchange of views with Said in the “Letters to the Editor”
section of the magazine. Lewis said that Said was guilty of more than
simple mistakes as a scholar and saw their difference of opinion as
fundamentally based in different ideological views. “Apparently
unwilling to defend his interpretation of Orientalism—a branch of
scholarship—on a scholarly level,” he wrote, “Mr. Said insists on
politicizing the whole question and assigning a political significance
not only to his own statements but also to those of any who have the
temerity to question his facts and methods.”1
Lewis especially objected to Said’s link between Orientalism as an
area of study and Europe’s empire*-building policies. He felt this view
made the arguments too simplistic and that it was unfair to Orientalism
as a discipline. Lewis said that Orientalism’s wide range of interests
showed how limited Said’s argument was.2 Other critics pointed out
that Europeans had been studying the Islamic world since long before
the modern age of empire.
Some academics, meanwhile, have simply ignored Said’s
arguments. In his book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of
World Order, published in 1996, the American political scientist Samuel
Huntington,* argued that future global conflicts would develop out
of cultural differences and that Islam was directly opposed to “Western
civilization.”3 Several critics have suggested, though, that Huntington’s

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view of Islam absolutely conforms to the traditional Orientalist view

that Said had depicted.
Critics who were sympathetic to Said’s overall thinking generally
agreed with his opinion that the way the West had written about the
Orient* had indeed allowed the thinking that enabled colonialism to
develop. But some did point out gaps and conflicts in Said’s ideas and
his thinking. Scholars such as the Indian philosopher Gayatri Spivak*
have criticized Orientalism for failing to take into account both gender
and class. Others see Said’s humanism*—his rationalist outlook—as
outdated.

Responses
Said responded to the critics he saw as more traditionally Orientalist
by saying that they had completely misunderstood his point about the
relationship between Orientalism and colonialism. He reminded them
that Orientalism was not just about the content of Orientalist writing,
but also about how that content is expressed. He felt they missed his
point about the relationship the scholar assumed he had with the
Oriental subject.
Said also argued that Orientalists were unwilling to acknowledge
what he saw as the clear political dimension of much of their
scholarship. He used Napoleon’s journey to Egypt in 1798* to argue
that research into the Orient* often took place in order to prepare the
way for political or economic colonization. Said again stated that his
main academic interest in examining Orientalism was the “remarkable
parallel between the rise of modern Orientalist scholarship and the
acquisition of vast Eastern empires by Britain and France.” That, he
insisted, was a “crucial point that [Bernard] Lewis refuses to deal
with.”4
Said’s most passionate defense of Orientalism came as a response to
the suggestion that he saw the Occident (the countries of the West)
and the Orient (the East) as distinct and separate, when in reality they

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were part of a continuous sequence and at certain points were not all
that different.The point was made by scholars who were sympathetic
to Said’s views, such as anthropologist James Clifford,* as well as by
some who were completely opposed to his arguments like Bernard
Lewis. Said hit back by saying that he saw the East as described by
Orientalists as something they themselves had constructed. It was
based around a geographical understanding they had built themselves
that obscured the very real complexities of both human experience
and human history.

Conflict and Consensus

Many scholars found inspiration in Said’s ideas and went on to both
create and then develop the modern field of postcolonial studies.*
But the core disagreement between Said’s view of colonialism and the
view of traditional Orientalists has never been resolved. Now the
voices of emerging neoconservatives*—those who think there is
currently a deep and fundamental conflict between the Muslim and
Arab worlds and Western civilization—have also been added to those
who do not accept Said’s view.
His most outspoken critics have not shifted much, if at all, in their
opposition to his ideas, and it can be said that they became even more
sure of their stance after the 9/11* terrorist attacks of 2001.
Said continued to defend his views and focused on responding to
what he saw as people’s misinterpretations of Orientalism. Later, he
added an epilogue to the book where he expressed regret over the fact
that some groups in the Arab world had used his work to justify an
aggressive and rigid form of nationalism. He was also concerned that
academia was too focused on language when he felt that the need for
rigorous historical analysis was just as important.
Many scholars have been inspired by Said’s historical approach that
draws from many different disciplines, and have used this means of
study to further analyze colonialism and its legacies. A significant

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amount of this new work focuses on international development,

governance, and aid and how these modern activities can, in fact, be
seen as the same colonial ideas being expressed in a new form.
Orientalism has also led to detailed studies that look at how colonial
culture and ways of governing actually changed the colonized
societies.

NOTES
1 Edward W. Said, Oleg Grabar, and Bernard Lewis, “Orientalism: An
Exchange,” New York Review of Books, August 12, 1982.
2 Bernard Lewis, “The Question of Orientalism,” New York Review of Books,
June 24, 1982.
3 Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World
Order, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).
4 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 343.

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 MODULE 10
THE EVOLVING DEBATE
KEY POINTS
• Orientalism’s most important contribution was to emphasize
the enduring impact of colonialism* and its influence on
the global political and economic power structures that
followed.
• Humanities scholars widely consider Orientalism to be the
founding text in the field of postcolonial studies.* It set out
a framework that academics in fields such as literature,
history, art history, and cultural and sexuality studies, have
all drawn on.
• Orientalism had a significant impact on a large number of
prominent academics.

Uses and Problems

Edward Said’s Orientalism argues that Western academic thinking had a
complex relationship with political institutions, and that this was a
subject worth studying. Many readers agreed with Said that these
relationships were hard to disentangle. For them, Said’s thinking
identified an important problem. How do you study non-Western
societies without reinforcing a view of power that devalues the non-
Western subject? Said suggests that the best way to solve the problem
is to focus on how these societies are represented, the language that is
used in doing so and the way verbal and written interactions create a
view of something (i.e. discourse).* This approach, inspired by the
French philosopher Michel Foucault,* is an integral part of
postcolonial studies.

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“‘new’Thescholarship
most thought-provoking dimension of the
on colonial situations, in relation to
the ‘old’, is the way it calls into question the position
of the observer, not simply in terms of social biases but
in terms of the ways in which forms of knowledge and
conceptions of change are themselves shaped by a history
of which imperialism* is a central development.
”
Frederick Cooper,* Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History

Since Said, much academic work on colonialism has focused on

how colonial rule created a very particular system of language and
concepts to allow the West to organize and understand knowledge.
The system was ultimately designed to give approval to those in
power.These were, of course, issues that Said raised in Orientalism.The
Indian philosopher Gayatri Spivak* has defined the colonial
“subaltern”* (a person or group considered to be of inferior rank) in
terms of their speech. The scholar Homi Bhabha* has argued that
hybridity*—the cultural mix that means both colonizers and
colonized are not wholly part of one group or another, resulting in
social and cultural misunderstandings—is a key feature of coloniality.*
All these ideas can be traced back to Orientalism.
Said defined Orientalism as a discourse that is there to produce
and reproduce global power structures. In doing so he questioned
whether decolonization* could really be seen as being a true break
with the past. He argues that even under independent rule, European
domination persisted. Said’s ideas showed how the colonial discourse
continues through modern global activities. His book helped to lay
the groundwork for further study of the power dynamics that
colonialism left behind.

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Schools of Thought
Orientalism defined empire* as more than just a system of government
and economics. It was a way of seeing the world. Said’s primary focus
on the notion and effects of empire and colonialism gave rise to
modern Western postcolonial studies. This subject looks at many
interesting concepts and subgroups, such as subalternity, hybridity,
transnationalism* (the fact that people can move about more freely
nowadays), and gender and sexuality studies.
Subaltern studies began in the 1980s and was pushed forward at
first by a group of South Asian historians who were very critical of the
fact that academic history on the Indian subcontinent was driven by
colonial and postcolonial works. The aim of subaltern studies is to
make the subaltern—the poor, non-white peasant—the center of
attention. Despite working with sources that are different from the
ones Said used for Orientalism, subaltern studies does focus on a
number of the same issues. How are Orientals represented? And
importantly, who is allowed to represent whom? This makes plain the
power issues that come up when the act of representation takes place.
Said focused on what was produced culturally both by and for a
European elite to drive his arguments. Subaltern studies puts social and
economic class at the center of the postcolonial issue in a way that Said
did not. It also brings into question Said’s strict division between the
colonizer and the colonized by exploring the vital role played by elite
members of colonized societies in supporting the colonial project. By
doing this, subaltern studies tries to write “history from below” putting
the subaltern—the poor, non-white peasant—center stage. This
viewpoint had rarely been taken into account in mainstream historical
scholarship.1
Recent scholars have studied the idea of “regimes of knowledge”
that were created by colonial rule.Works like Nicholas Dirks’* Castes
of Mind,2 Eric Hobsbawm’s* The Invention of Tradition,3 and Max
Weiss’s* In the Shadow of Sectarianism4 analyze how European colonial

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administrations brought European understandings of the societies

they colonized into their governing processes and organization of
social structures. However, these views were often wrong. For example,
Dirks argues that the caste system in India is neither as rigid nor as
unified as it is often portrayed in the West. It was false assumptions,
therefore, that changed colonial societies in ways that continue to have
an impact today.
Alongside Said and Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha is considered
one of the founders of postcolonial studies. He has examined what he
calls the neglected liminality* between the colonizer and the
colonized. This is the point where these groups intersect. In The
Location of Culture,5 Bhabha studies the anxious, unstable nature of the
colonial relationship. In his view, colonial rule is not just about who
dominates and who is dominated. It is also an unsettling encounter
with the “Other.” The colonizer is acutely aware of being “out of
place.” Even while colonizers have power, they are still dependent on
the “native informant.”This informant is a non-European government
official, who in effect becomes a mirror image of the colonizer himself.
Bhabha calls this “mimicry.”
Bhabha argues that this colonial anxiety drives the colonizer to
constantly want to reinforce his or her identity and emphasize the
differences between the colonizer and the colonized. This in turn
produces stereotypes that are full of contradictions: “natives” who are
oversexed yet impotent, cunning yet intellectually inferior, lazy yet
efficient workers. Bhabha calls this area of uncertainty “hybridity.” It
is a core concept in postcolonial theory, even if not everyone agrees
with it.
Scholars have looked at other areas in assessing colonial history.
Anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler* has been influential, bringing
sexuality and reproduction into her analysis of colonial discourse. In
Stoler’s view, colonial powers’ strict regimes of sexual control
reinforced the idea of difference.6 People who did not fit into what

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the colonial powers believed to be acceptable categories—for

example, mixed-race couples and children—were considered a danger
to social stability.
Other scholars such as Lila Abu-Lughod,* Leila Ahmed,* and
Deniz Kandiyoti* have focused on gender issues. In works including
Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East,7 Women
and Gender in Islam,8 and Women, Islam and the State,9 these scholars
have looked at how gender relations also shaped the colonial discourse.
When a Victorian idea of domestic femininity was brought into
colonized societies, it highlighted more misunderstandings about local
culture. Strict Victorian sexual morality created its opposite—the idea
of the “backward,” oppressed Oriental woman, who needs to be
rescued by European values.
Recent scholarship examines the growth of neoliberalism,* a
philosophy that believes in free trade and the deregulation of trading
and financial markets, and its relation to colonialism. In their book
Empire,10 Michael Hardt* and Antonio Negri* argue that in the
second half of the twentieth century the old colonialism (a system that
was based on an interaction between a powerful country and its
colonies) gave way to a more global system of European and American
domination. This involved multinational corporations as well as the
United Nations,* the World Bank,* and the International Monetary
Fund.* Along with Bhabha and Spivak and others, Hardt and Negri
are exploring how the old colonial models that Said laid out in
Orientalism are changing and evolving.

In Current Scholarship
Orientalism is now part of a large body of work in postcolonial studies
that includes a wide range of anti-colonial* texts. Some of these were
written by authors living in the colonized world during the first half
of the twentieth century; others were written during the Cold War*
period by those living in former European colonies.

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Certain scholars are working further on Said’s core idea that

Orientalism was a system of thought that brought about Western
colonial power. Others are developing new thoughts and ideas to drive
the debate forward. Talal Asad’s* work on religion in the modern
world (particularly Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam,
Modernity)11 takes a distinctive approach, questioning the view that
Western secularism*—a system that is unconnected with spiritual or
religious matters—is the only legitimate “modern” way for society to
be organized.
Ann Laura Stoler studies how methods of racial and sexual control
began in the colonies. Her major works are Carnal Knowledge and
Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule,12 and Race and the
Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order
of Things.13 These two books address questions of sexuality and
colonialism that Said discusses only briefly in Orientalism. Stoler looks
at the sexualized language of colonial conquest and examines the way
non-Western sexuality has been both demonized and trivialized. Most
importantly, she questions the stress colonialism places on the “innate”
difference between the colonizer and the colonized.

NOTES
1 Ranajit Guha, ed., A Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986–1995 (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
2 Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
3 Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
4 Max Weiss, In the Shadow of Sectarianism: Law, Shi`ism, and the Making of
Modern Lebanon (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).
5 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge Press, 1994).
6 Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the
Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

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7 Lila Abu-Lughod, ed., Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the

Middle East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
8 Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern
Debate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
9 Deniz Kandiyoti, ed., Women, Islam and the State (Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1991).
10 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Boston: Harvard University Press,
2000).
11 Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).
12 Stoler, Carnal Knowledge.
13 Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s ‘History of
Sexuality’ and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press,
1995).

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 MODULE 11
IMPACT AND INFLUENCE TODAY
KEY POINTS
• Orientalism is taught and used widely across the social sciences
and humanities and is considered one of the most important
twentieth-century works of intellectual history and critical theory.*
• Said’s ideas in Orientalism continue to challenge the
cultural, political, and economic domination of formerly
colonized peoples and territories.
• Those responding to the text’s challenges fall into two
groups: those who reject Orientalism’s main arguments as
unfairly characterizing the West and the field of Orientalism,
and those who seek to use Said’s ideas to constructively
investigate their own fields, or explore issues related to
colonialism* and its aftermath more thoroughly.

Position
Edward Said’s Orientalism was written as a challenge to the dominant
modes of thought in this area.The book discusses a deeply rooted and
complex system of global power relations. This means that its central
concerns are more relevant than ever in the post-Cold War,* post-
9/11* world. As Said pointed out in a later work, Covering Islam,1
Western depictions of Arabs and Islam became more racially
stereotyped after the 9/11 attacks. They then intensified during the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This has coincided with an increasingly
globalized economic system that has increased inequality, with Western
countries controlling much of the money while Eastern factories do
much of the work. In this context, it is clear that Said’s concept of
Orientalist discourse is still worthy of discussion.

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“better
What I should like also to have contributed here is a
understanding of the way cultural domination has
operated. If this stimulates a new kind of dealing with
the Orient, indeed if it eliminates the ‘Orient’ and the
‘Occident’ altogether, then we shall have advanced a little
in the process of what Raymond Williams has called the
‘unlearning’ of ‘the inherent dominative mode.
Edward Said, Orientalism
”
Interaction
Said challenged the idea that scholars could isolate themselves from
the people they studied. He said there is an undeniable political
relationship between the two. Orientalism talks about the importance
of looking at the conditions under which scholars study, and examines
the fact that they are generally seen as people who tell the truth.This
issue was also taken up by Indian philosopher Gayatri Spivak* in “Can
the Subaltern Speak?”2.The relationship between the scholar and the
studied is vitally important and Said’s work demands that scholars
examine the assumptions they make about their subject.
This is especially important when it is Western scholars studying
previously colonized places. Orientalism questions the field of “area
studies,”* i.e. broad-based study of a defined region, such as African or
Middle East studies. It suggests that these are categories that were born
out of the colonial era. The Iranian–American scholar Hamid
Dabashi* has developed this idea, suggesting that dividing the world
into regions defined by the West has created “disposable knowledge.”
This is because once the political system changes, the category is no
longer useful.
According to Dabashi, the lead-up to the United States’ war in
Afghanistan was an example of this, as knowledge about Afghan

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 Macat Analysis of Edward Said’s Orientalism

history, society, and culture was produced. Scholars like Timothy

Mitchell* have applied this idea to international development, aid, and
policy issues. They see a discourse that positions the West as “acting”
and “saving.” In this discourse, “Othered” cultures naturally need help
from the superior West. Said’s Orientalism dealt with issues of the
materials scholars produce and the idea that you can’t separate
knowledge from political power. His work provides a framework and a
vocabulary for these schools of thought.
Said took many of his theoretical ideas from poststructuralist*
philosophy, the idea that all knowledge is created through discourse.*
The French philosopher Michel Foucault’s* concept of discourse
analysis was especially important. But Said’s ideas were different,
because he saw everything in terms of its political and historical
context. Said felt that the poststructuralist emphasis was too focused
on the mechanics of language.
For Said, historical context was absolutely necessary to understand
a text. His way of reading tried to look at how a text both reflects and
also actively produces the political conditions it is born from. For Said,
all scholarly and cultural activity is political by nature.The purpose of
reading is to shine a light on how something political is expressed and
then taken forward by a text. By challenging some elements of
poststructural theory, Orientalism made a different approach possible.

The Continuing Debate

Thanks in large part to Edward Said and Orientalism, colonialism is
now studied for what it can tell us about cultural discourse, politics,
and economics. Scholars look at “modernity” and modernization with
a critical eye. And the idea that Western secular* modernity is
civilization at its best has now been rigorously challenged.
Said said that he was particularly interested in “the extension of
post-colonial concerns to the problems of geography.”3 Modern
academics like Ammiel Alcalay,* Paul Gilroy,* and Moira Ferguson*

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have explored this question.They share the approach of Said’s Culture

and Imperialism.4 Three good examples are Alcalay’s After Jews and
Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture,5 Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic:
Modernity and Double Consciousness,6 and Ferguson’s Subject to Others:
British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834.7 All these works
look at what is happening in the modern world and its roots in
colonialism. They try to offer a new way of seeing the world that
doesn’t depend on the most important Western texts.

NOTES
1 Edward Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine
How We See the Rest of the World (New York: Vintage Books, 1997).
2 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, in Marxism and
the Interpretation of Culture: International Conference: Selected Papers,
eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1988).
3 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 350.
4 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994).
5 Ammiel Alcalay, After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992).
6 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
7 Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial
Slavery, 1670–1834 (New York: Routledge, 1992).

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 MODULE 12
WHERE NEXT?
KEY POINTS
• As a text with ongoing political and intellectual relevance,
Orientalism is likely to continue to be expanded on,
reinterpreted, and analyzed by people interested in issues
relating to colonialism* and postcoloniality.*
• The analytical tools employed in Orientalism—working with
a wide interdisciplinary* archive of material, discourse*
analysis, integrating political arguments into more abstract
philosophy, and critical theory*—will most likely be used by
scholars for some time to come.
• Orientalism is a text that speaks to a wide range of
people—including those who have not traditionally had
a voice that is considered “legitimate” or “serious” by
mainstream academia.

Potential
Orientalism was published more than 30 years ago, but it is still
important today in challenging colonialism and its legacies. Edward
Said’s work created new ways to understand postcolonial power and
cultural discourse.
Said’s work was specifically about Middle Eastern and Islamic
studies, but it exerts an influence across the broader humanities. His
ideas have shaped debate in history, anthropology, and cultural studies,
as well as area studies,* which is the broad study of a particular region,
for example Middle East studies. New generations of academics
continue to reinterpret his work for the present day.

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“we Ifarewetoarelearnto take Said’s legacy seriously, then—if

not only from his writings but just as
essentially from the intellectual life that he led—we
must take responsibility, publicly, for engaging this new
US imperial* formation and its attendant forms of
violence and intimidation, both domestic and foreign.
And to do so requires that we reintegrate Said’s specific
intellectual and political engagements with the past and
present of empire* in the Middle East* … and its forms
of culture, power, and knowledge.
”
Nadia Abu El-Haj,* “Edward Said and the Political Present,” American
Ethnologist

Orientalism’s importance lies in its original arguments and in the

ever-changing political context in which it is read. Said insisted that
colonialism shaped the colonizers as well as colonized societies. The
effects of this are still being felt all over the world in both Eastern and
Western societies. The historian Frederick Cooper* wrote: “Said’s
influence has been profound and not limited to literary studies … His
approach opened up analysis of a wide array of cultural productions
and their representations of difference, power, and progress.” Cooper
also explained how Orientalism “has helped to explain how different
kinds of political processes became imaginable or inconceivable.”1
Most of Orientalism discusses how Orientalist thought and
European colonialism both developed between the eighteenth
century and the early twentieth century. But the book’s last section,
“Orientalism Now,” looks at the ways in which Orientalist discourse
is still at work at present. Said insisted that Orientalism did not end
when the colonies ended. It is still alive and it is still evolving.
The political environment since 9/11* shows that Said was right
about this. Colonialism is still with us. Many people believe that much

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 Macat Analysis of Edward Said’s Orientalism

of America’s “War on Terror” was self-declared and a large part of the

war has been carried out covertly, both inside America and abroad.
This particular war has blurred the lines between military action,
policing, and spying. Postcolonial theorists are now analyzing how
territory and populations are being classified, racialized, and subjected
to surveillance in new ways. Many scholars—among them Sverker
Finnström,* Neil Whitehead,* Achille Mbembe* and Mahmood
Mamdani*— are working in this area, drawing heavily on Orientalism
as they do so.

Future Directions
New scholars will most likely continue to use Said’s analysis to explore
the ways in which gender and sexuality play into the history and
evolution of Orientalist thought. Feminist scholars have criticized Said
for neglecting this. Ann Laura Stoler* uses Said’s theories to examine
various aspects of this issue. She has suggested that the modern
European idea of “proper” sexuality and family structure was shaped
by the colonizers’ need to differentiate themselves from the colonized.
Stoler investigates how the current situation has led to new forms of
sexual policing.
Theorists including Jasbir Puar* are exploring how sexuality
formed a core element of colonialist and postcolonialist control. Puar’s
work builds on Said’s view that the figure of the “Oriental” was
produced by Europe to define the West as clearly superior.This would
then justify colonial intervention. Puar sees the new figure of the
“Arab/Muslim terrorist” as an Orientalist stereotype and relates to the
Victorian-era idea of the Oriental as a delinquent “monster.”2 She also
examines how Western ideas of sexuality are used as a barometer of
“modernity.” She calls this “homonationalism.” Her work draws on
Said’s ideas about culture, discourse, and hegemony* (the dominance
of one party by another) to examine ongoing processes of domination
in the present day.

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 Section 3: Impact; Module 12: Where Next?

Summary
Edward Said’s Orientalism has had a profound impact. It changed the
study of the humanities and how academics relate to their subject. It
also influenced the broader political debate about global power, the
legacy of colonialism, and American influence in politics, economics
and culture. Indeed it still does so today.
Orientalism helped to create a new conceptual framework and
language.This made it possible to look at colonial studies as a study in
power. Said’s theories gave a voice to the previously colonized, so they
could oppose the way they were represented and, in many ways,
enslaved.To this extent it is a text of liberation.
Orientalism questioned the supposed objectivity and impartiality
that disguised the political and social implications of Orientalist
scholarship. In it, Said challenged academics to look at the political
context and reflect on their own relationship to their area of study.
The book is an argument against a universally accepted way of
understanding the world. It is also a call for political accountability.
Orientalism could not have had such an impact on American academic
thinking if it had not itself come from high up in the country’s
academic system.
Unlike many works of scholarship, Orientalism has remained
relevant since its publication. As the Cold War* between the United
States and the Soviet Union came to an end, global capitalism* was
expanding. Colonies were over, but other power dynamics were
appearing. Events like the 1979 Iranian Revolution,* the escalation of
the Israeli–Palestinian conflict,* and the 9/11 terrorist attacks have
kept colonialist concerns very much in the spotlight. The field Said
helped to found with Orientalism—postcolonial studies—has grown
and evolved with the changing times. Said’s framework can still be
used to analyze how our world is structured and how we can
understand this structure. More recent scholars have brought different
ideas about class, gender, and race to bear on Orientalism’s original

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arguments. This important work continues to provide a basis for

further investigation into empire and its legacies in the modern world.

NOTES
1 Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 47.
2 Jasbir K. Puar and Amit Rai, “Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism
and the Production of Docile Patriots,” Social Text 20, no. 3 (2002), 117–
48.

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 GLOSSARY

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 GLOSSARY OF TERMS

Anti-colonialism: opposition to colonial rule—that is, the system

whereby one nation rules over another.

Anti-imperialism: opposition to the system of rule by empire.

Arab–Israeli War (1948): the first Arab–Israeli War. Israel declared its
independence on May 14, 1948 and was invaded one day later by
Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq.The Israelis, who had been opposing a
revolt aimed at establishing an independent Palestinian state, won the
war; over the next three years some 700,000 Palestinian Arabs were
either expelled from, or fled, the new country.

Area studies: academic discipline in the post-World War II*

American academy, focusing on knowledge produced on the politics,
literature, economy, and cultures of a defined geographical area (such
as Middle East studies, Latin American studies,African studies, and East
Asian studies).

Black September: a Palestinian terrorist organization founded in

1970.The organization was responsible for the 1972 Munich
Olympics attacks, in which 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team
were kidnaped and killed in a politically motivated action.The group
takes its name from an episode in the Jordanian Civil War, which began
in September 1970 and led to the expulsion of the Palestinian
Liberation Organization (PLO) from Jordan.

Bourgeoisie: the wealthy, capital-owning, upper-middle class in

capitalist society. Figures prominently in the work of Karl Marx.

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 Glossary of Terms

British Mandate: a legal commission set up by the League of

Nations in the aftermath of World War I, to administer parts of the
former Ottoman empire.The lands, which today comprise Israel, the
West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and Jordan, were collectively known as
Palestine at the time, and were made subject to British rule.The
Mandate Territories were made up of two protectorates: Palestine and
Transjordan.

Capitalism: economic and political system in which a country’s trade

and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by
the state.

Civil rights movement: 1960s movement in the United States that

called for an end to racial segregation.

Cold War (1947–91): sustained political tension between the

capitalist, US-dominated West and communist USSR (Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics) and its allies, creating a bipolar world-
power system that largely determined global politics for its duration.

Colonialism: establishment, exploitation, maintenance, acquisition,

and expansion of colonies in one territory by people from another
territory. Results in a set of unequal relationships between the colonial
power and the colony, and often between the colonists and the native
population.

Coloniality: the legacy that colonialism imparts in a society.

Coloniality refers to the psychological, rather than the physical,
products of capitalism.These products include attitudes, racial and
social prejudices, and social and caste structures.They are derived from
systems of knowledge produced by the colonial power and imposed
on the colonized.

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Counter-hegemonic: thought that attempts to question, challenge,

and subvert dominant systems of power and the associated ways of
understanding the world.

Critical theory: body of philosophy with a strong Marxist*

influence that seeks to critique twentieth- and twenty-first-century
society and culture.

Decolonization: the process of being freed from colonial rule.

Deconstruction: the method of taking apart texts in order to find

their hidden meanings. Deconstruction assumes words have meanings
only in relation to one another. For example, red is red because it is not
any other color. If words have meanings because they contrast to one
another, then the words an author chooses to put together show the
beliefs and choices that author makes in expressing their views.

Disciplinary power: Michel Foucault’s concept of disciplinary

power suggests that a dominant group exerts authority over its subjects
or subordinates by credibly threatening to punish any who attempt to
exceed the bounds imposed on them.An example would be the
disciplinary power wielded by prison guards over prisoners.

Discourse (Foucauldian discourse): French philosopher Michel

Foucault’s concept of a large system of interrelated signs created
through verbal interaction in societies. Discourse is an ever-expanding
body of knowledge, articulated in a particular vocabulary, which
defines the way in which the world can be “known” and understood.

Discursive formation: a term in discourse analysis. It describes the

communications (written, spoken, performed, etc.) that form
discourses to be analyzed.

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 Glossary of Terms

Empire: an extensive group of states or countries under a single

supreme authority. Said focuses particularly on the leading European
empires of the nineteenth century, such as the French and British
empires that colonized large territories of the Islamic world.

Epistemology: the theory of knowledge.

Frankfurt School (critical theory): a school of philosophy of the

1920s whose followers were involved in a reappraisal of Marxism,
particularly in terms of the cultural and aesthetic dimension of
modern industrial society. Principal figures include Theodor Adorno,
Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse.

Geographic-temporal imagination: Said proposes that a location

or a people exist not only in reality, but also as an artificial construct
shaped by unifying or dominant views of geography and history,
reinforced by stories, maps, and descriptive imagery.

Hegemony: the dominance of one party by another, which includes

indirect forms of domination, such as the dominant party holding the
exclusive right to set social norms and assume the role of leader.

Humanism: rationalist outlook or system of thought attaching prime

importance to human rather than divine or supernatural matters.

Hybridity: Homi Bhabha’s concept of the fundamental anxiety and

instability at the heart of the colonial encounter, the space between
colonizer and colonized in which identity and power are established
and contested.

Imperial: of or relating to an empire. Said uses the term with

particular emphasis to the power and domination represented by the

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 Macat Analysis of Edward Said’s Orientalism

empire and the process of colonization.

Interdisciplinary: relating to more than one branch of knowledge.

International Monetary Fund (IMF): an organization of 188

countries, based in Washington, D.C., that promotes global financial
stability. It lends money to heavily indebted countries when no one
else will.

Iranian Revolution (1979): revolt that ousted Western-backed Shah

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (the ruler of Iran at the time) and saw the
establishment of an Islamic Republic led by Shi‘a religious leader
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Israeli–Palestinian conflict: tension that arguably originated with

the 1948 expulsion of most of the Palestinian Arab population from
present-day Israel. It has seen several intensifications over the past three
decades, including the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and two
intifadas (Palestinian uprisings): one in 1987–91 and another in
2000–5.

Liminality: state of being between or on the borders of (but not

wholly a part of) groups, definitions, or identities.

Linguistics: the study of human speech in all its aspects.

Marxism: an approach to social science based on materialism, history,

and class, founded by Karl Marx in the nineteenth century. It views
everything as reflective of an eternal class struggle, with the goal of
transforming society into a classless utopia (perfect place). Forms of
Marxism remain popular today.

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 Glossary of Terms

Middle East: an extensive area of southwestern Asia and northern

Africa, stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to Pakistan and
including the Arabian Peninsula.Also known as the Near East in
historical contexts.

Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt (1798–1801): Napoleon

Bonaparte of France invaded Egypt in order to wrest the region from
British influence. He also brought a group of intellectuals with him to
spread scientific learning and Enlightenment ideas.

Near Eastern: a term generally applied to the countries of

southwestern Asia between the Mediterranean Sea and India, also
called the “Middle East.”The term is especially used in historical
contexts.

Négritude: literary and intellectual movement originated by black,

French-speaking thinkers and writers in the 1930s. It centered on
blackness as a shared collective identity and rejected French
colonialism.

Neoconservatism: school of political thought that emerged in the

American academy in the 1960s and continued to evolve throughout
the latter half of the twentieth century. It was characterized by a
championing of democracy and US-national interests, brought about
through military intervention if necessary, and a belief that the Muslim
and Arab worlds constitute the principal opponents of Western
civilization.

Neoliberalism: economic and political philosophy that advocates

free trade, the deregulation of markets, and the rollback of the liberal
welfare state.

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9/11: the hijacking of four passenger airliners in the United States by

19 individuals affiliated with the al-Qaeda terrorist organization.Two
planes were flown into the World Trade Center towers in New York
City and one into the Pentagon military headquarters in Washington,
DC on September 11, 2001, resulting in significant loss of life.

Orient: the countries of Asia, including those of the Middle East. Said
juxtaposes this term with the “West” or “Occident,” which
encompasses Europe and North America.

Palestine issue: see Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

Paternalism: policy or practise on the part of people in authority of

restricting the freedom and responsibilities of those subordinate to or
otherwise dependent on them in their supposed interest.

Postcolonial studies, postcolonialism, postcolonial theory:

academic disciplines that critically examine the cultural, political,
economic, and social process of colonialism and its legacies.

Poststructuralism: loosely defined intellectual movement of the

mid- to late-twentieth century that pushed back against the early-
twentieth-century structuralist movement’s contention that
knowledge is formed in binaries (for example, male/female, East/
West). Broadly, it argues that all knowledge is created through
discourse and is by definition ever changing and unstable. Prominent
philosophers (not all of whom accept the poststructuralist label)
include Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Jean Baudrillard, and Jacques
Derrida.

Proletariat: laboring, wage-earning class in capitalist society.The

term is derived from the politico-economic thought of Karl Marx.

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 Glossary of Terms

Secular: unconnected with spiritual or religious matters.

Six-Day War: a 1967 conflict sparked by an attack on Israel by Egypt,

Syria, and Jordan.The Israelis survived initial losses to win the war,
thanks largely to their access to American military technology.

Subaltern: any person or group of inferior rank and station, whether

because of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or religion.

Textuality: an idea in linguistics and literary theory. It is a

characteristic of a text (i.e. an object under study) that communicates
meaning.A text’s textuality is never set in stone; given aspects of a text
have more or less textuality at given times to given people.

Transnationalism: social phenomenon and scholarly research

agenda resulting from the rise in global connections between people
and the decreasing importance of economic and social boundaries
between nations.

United Nations: an organization of 193 countries, established in

1945 to promote world peace and cooperation among nations.

Vietnam War: a 20-year war (1955–75) fought between the

Communist Northern Vietnamese and the South Vietnamese, who
were heavily backed by the United States, which deployed its forces in
1964.The protracted conflict had a major impact on American
politics, most notably with the rise of the anti-war movement, part of
the larger counterculture movement of the 1960s.The Vietnam War
led many scholars to examine the notion of an “American empire”
and the history and legacy of empires more generally.

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World Bank: the International Bank for Reconstruction and

Development, known as the World Bank, is an organization of 188
countries, based in Washington, D.C., that assists low- and middle-
income countries to reduce poverty and develop their economies.

World systems theory: an approach to world history associated with

Immanuel Wallerstein. It sees a “division of labor” imposed on the
world, with “core” states focusing on lucrative, high-skill work, and
“peripheral” states focusing on intensive, low-pay work.

World War I (1914–18): an international conflict centered in Europe

and involving the major economic world powers of the day.

World War II (1939–45): global war between the vast majority of

world states, including all great powers of the time.

Yom Kippur War (1973): War fought between Israel and a coalition
of Arab states. Fighting broke out on October 6, 1973 (the Jewish holy
day of Yom Kippur) and continued until October 25.

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 PEOPLE MENTIONED IN THE TEXT

Anouar Abdel-Malek (1924–2012) was an Egyptian–French

professor of political science. He believed passionately that Arab
nations in North Africa and the Middle East should unite as one—he
was a pan-Arabist.Although he studied philosophy as a student, he
became a prominent political scientist from 1970 as head of Paris’s
premier research institute, the Centre Nationale de la Recherche
Scientifique (National Centre for Scientific Research).

Nadia Abu El Haj (b. 1962) is a Palestinian–American

anthropologist who currently teaches at Barnard College in New York
City. Her work has focused on the intersection of modern scientific
disciplines (such as archaeology and genetics) and racial, ethnic, and
national identity.

Ibrahim Abu-Lughod (1929–2001) was a Palestinian–American

political scientist who was a professor at Northwestern University. Said
dedicated Orientalism to him as an acknowledgment of his work in the
field.

Lila Abu-Lughod (b. 1952) is a Palestinian–American

anthropologist at Columbia University whose work has been highly
influential in gender, Middle East, and postcolonial studies.* Her more
prominent works include Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a
Bedouin Society and Do Muslim Women Need Saving?

Eqbal Ahmad (1933–99) was a Pakistani political scientist, writer,

journalist, and anti-war activist. He argued that colonial powers
misused their position for economic gain.

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 Macat Analysis of Edward Said’s Orientalism

Leila Ahmed (b. 1940) is an Egyptian–American scholar of Middle

East history and gender studies at Harvard University. Her work on
gender in Islam has been notably influential; she is best known for her
book, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate.

Ammiel Alcalay (b. 1956) is assistant professor of classical and

Oriental literatures at Queens College (City University of New York).
As a poet, translator, writer, and critic, he has written widely on
literary and historical politics in the cultures of the Mediterranean.

Idi Amin (1925–2003) was the third President of Uganda. His

authoritarian rule of Uganda (between 1971 and 1979) was
characterized by corruption, human rights abuses, and mass murder.

Talal Asad (b. 1933) is an anthropologist at the City University of

New York (CUNY). He has made a major contribution to
postcolonial theory, in particular calling for a re-examination of
secularism.

Jane Austen (1775–1817) was a British writer known for her novels
on English upper-class social mores, including Pride and Prejudice and
Sense and Sensibility. Her depictions of Orientalism have come under
scrutiny by postcolonial scholars.

Homi Bhabha (b. 1949) is a cultural studies scholar at Harvard

University and one of the most important figures in postcolonial
studies* (along with Said and Gayatri Spivak). His best-known work is
his 1994 collection of essays, The Location of Culture, in which he
established such influential concepts as mimicry and hybridity.*

Aimé Césaire (1913–2008) was a poet, playwright, author, and

political activist from Martinique. He helped found the French-

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 People Mentioned in the Text

speaking Négritude* movement in colonial literature that sought to

affirm black solidarity and identity in the face of racist French colonial
ideology.

James Clifford (b. 1945) is an American historian at the University

of California at Santa Cruz. He is best known for his critical work in
the field of anthropology.

Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) was a Polish author who settled in

England. He is best known for his novella about Belgian colonialism*
in the Congo, Heart of Darkness.

Frederick Cooper (b. 1947) is an American historian and currently

a professor of history at New York University. He is best known for his
work in colonization, decolonization, and African history.

Hamid Dabashi (b. 1951) is an Iranian–American postcolonial and

cultural studies scholar at Columbia University and a former colleague
of Said’s. His work, including Brown Skin,White Masks, Iran:A People
Interrupted and Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in Time of Terror,
follows in Said’s interdisciplinary* mold, and deals with questions of
identity and power in the postcolonial world.

Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) was a French philosopher and critical

theorist, founder of the “deconstructionist” idea. Deconstruction is all
about finding the multiple meanings in a text, many of which the
original author may not have intended and which have a tendency to
shift and change based on context and reader. Derrida applied his
methodology to all forms of art, academia, and other cultural
communications.

Nicholas Dirks (b. 1950) is currently the Chancellor of the

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 Macat Analysis of Edward Said’s Orientalism

University of California, Berkeley. He is a champion of postcolonialism

and the author of numerous books on South Asian history and culture.

Frantz Fanon (1925–61) was a Martinique-born psychiatrist and

philosopher known for his work on the psychological effect of
colonialism on the colonized. He called for anti-colonial revolution as
the only means by which the colonized could free themselves; his
best-known works are The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin,White
Masks.

Moira Ferguson is James E. Ryan Chair in English and women’s

literature at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Her work, Subject to
Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834, explores
gender under colonial rule.

Sverker Finnström (b. 1970) is a senior lecturer at the department

of cultural anthropology and ethnology at Uppsala University in
Sweden. His work draws on Said’s Orientalism.

Gustave Flaubert (1821–80) was a prominent French author best

known for his novel Madame Bovary. Said discusses Flaubert’s writings
on the Orient in great length in Orientalism.

Michel Foucault (1926–84) was a French poststructuralist*

philosopher best known for his theories on knowledge production,
power, sexuality, and modern forms of governance and social control.
His works were an inspiration for Said.

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) was an Austrian psychologist known

for founding the field of modern psychoanalysis, which treats
psychological issues through dialogue in an attempt to unearth our
basic drives and memories.

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 People Mentioned in the Text

Paul Gilroy (b. 1956) is a professor of American and English

Literature at King’s College London. He has a particular interest in
postcolonial studies.

Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) was an Italian communist writer

and political philosopher, best known for his theory on hegemony.
Gramsci argued that the bourgeois ruling (producing) class in society
must manufacture consent to its rule; this consent and its supporting
structures are called hegemony.

Michael Hardt (b. 1960) is an American political philosopher and

literary theorist. He is best known for the work Empire that he
co-wrote with Antonio Negri.

Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) was an Egyptian-born British

Marxist historian. He wrote widely on the rise of industrial
capitalism,* socialism, and nationalism and was one of Britain’s
foremost historians.

Samuel Huntington (1927–2008) was a conservative American

political scientist, author of the hotly debated, post-Cold War* text,
The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.

Deniz Kandiyoti (b. 1944) is a scholar in Middle East and gender

studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Her
work includes Women, Islam, and the State and Gendering the Middle East:
Emerging Perspectives.

T. E. Lawrence (1888–1935) was a British army officer who

famously participated in the 1916–18 Arab revolt against Ottoman
rule and exemplified the colonial stereotype of the colonizer “gone
native” (i.e. assimilated into the society of the colonized). His story was

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 Macat Analysis of Edward Said’s Orientalism

the basis of the film, Lawrence of Arabia, released in 1962 to great acclaim.

Bernard Lewis (b. 1916) is a British–American historian and

professor emeritus of Islamic history at Princeton University. He is
considered one of the most influential Western scholars of the Middle
East.

Mahmood Mamdani (b. 1946) is a Ugandan academic and director

of the Makerere Institute of Social Research, as well as the Herbert
Lehman professor of government at the School of International and
Public Affairs and the professor of anthropology, political science, and
African studies at Columbia University. He specializes in African
politics and history and a number of his works have explored
colonialism and its legacy.

Louis Massignon (1883–1962) was a Catholic scholar of Islam,

instrumental in getting Islam recognized by Catholics as an Abrahamic
faith. His work was studied by Said as a basis for Orientalism.

Achille Mbembe (b. 1957) is a philosopher and political scientist at

the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.
His work draws heavily on Said’s Orientalism.

Albert Memmi (b. 1920) is a Tunisian Jewish writer best known for
his novel, The Pillar of Salt, and his philosophical work, The Colonizer
and the Colonized, which analyzed the psychology of the complex
relationship between colonizer and colonized.

Timothy Mitchell (b. 1955) is a British political scientist and

postcolonial scholar at Columbia University. His work focuses on
Egypt and the development of governance structures during the
colonial and postcolonial periods. Important works include Colonising

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 People Mentioned in the Text

Egypt and Rule of Experts: Egypt,Techno-Politics, Modernity.

Jean Mohr (b. 1925) is a Swiss documentary photographer. He has

worked with some of the world’s major humanitarian organizations,
including the United Nations High Commission for Refugees and
the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

Robert Mugabe (b. 1924) is the current President of Zimbabwe,

having assumed office in 1987. He rules Zimbabwe as a one-party
state and has been accused of gross human rights violations in the
country.

Antonio Negri (b. 1933) is an Italian Marxist sociologist and

political philosopher. He is best known for the work Empire that he
co-wrote with Michael Hardt.

Jasbir Puar is associate professor of women’s and gender studies at

Rutgers University. She is known for her work on queer theory and
studies into how sexuality was used as a means of control by colonial
powers.

Ernest Renan (1823–92) was a French philosopher and writer. He

was an expert in Middle Eastern languages and civilizations.

Maxime Rodinson (1915–2004) was a French Marxist historian

and sociologist.As an Orientalist scholar, his work centered on Islamic
culture, particularly the prophet Mohammed, and he acquired a
reputation for his outspoken commentary on Middle Eastern affairs.

Silvestre de Sacy (1758–1838) was a French linguist, writer, and

Orientalist. Said studied his work to explore the origins of
Orientalism.

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 Macat Analysis of Edward Said’s Orientalism

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) was a French philosopher and writer

and key figure in twentieth-century philosophy and Marxism. His
work had a considerable influence on postcolonial studies.

R.W. Southern (1912–2001) was a celebrated English medieval

historian who spent most of his career at the University of Oxford and
was a popular and influential historian with students and the public.
Among his most renowned works is The Making of the Middle Ages
(1953).

Gayatri Spivak (b. 1942) is an Indian philosopher and critical

theorist at Columbia University, and one of the key figures of
postcolonial studies.* She is best known for her work critiquing
European systems of knowledge production and their silencing of
subaltern* voices—a theme she explored in depth in her seminal essay
“Can the Subaltern Speak?”

Ann Laura Stoler (b. 1949) is an American anthropologist at the

New School (New York City). She is best known for her work on
sexuality, empire, and postcoloniality.

A. L.Tibawi (1910–81) is a Palestinian historian. He studied in

Jerusalem before the formation of the modern state of Israel in 1948.
He then left the Middle East for London, where he set up a fund to
support Palestinian students made homeless by the creation of the
Israeli state while he was working at the University of London. His
life’s work focused on the international relations and diplomatic
history between the West (Europe and the USA) and the Middle East.

Immanuel Wallerstein (b. 1930) is an American sociologist and

senior research scholar at Yale University. He is known for his work on
the world systems theory.

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 People Mentioned in the Text

Max Weiss is an American scholar, translator, and associate professor

of history and Near Eastern studies at Princeton University. He
specializes in the culture and history of the Middle East.

Neil Whitehead (1956–2012) was an English anthropologist and

former professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-
Madison. He is known primarily for his work exploring the
anthropology of violence, post-human anthropology, and studies on
South America and the Caribbean.

William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) was an Irish poet and one of the
foremost poets of the twentieth century. Said used his poetry to
demonstrate how Orientalist ways of thinking had impacted Western
literature.

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 WORKS CITED

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 WORKS CITED

Abu El-Haj, Nadia. “Edward Said and the Political Present.” American
Ethnologist 32, no.4 (November 2004): 538–55.
Abu-Lughod, Lila, ed. Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the
Middle East. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.
Ahmed, Lila. Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern
Debate. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.
Alcalay, Ammiel. After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.
Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2003.
———. “Review: Orientalism by Edward Said.” The English Historical Review
95.376 (July 1980), 648–9.
Bengelsdorf, Carollee, Margaret Cerullo, and Yogesh Chandrani, eds. The
Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad. New York: Columbia University Press,
2006.
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge Press, 1994.
Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. Translated by Joan Pinkham. London
& New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972.
Cooper, Frederick. Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2002.
———. Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2005.
Dirks, Nicholas. Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Ferguson, Moira. Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial
Slavery, 1670–1834. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Finnström, Sverker and Neil Whitehead, eds. Virtual War and Magical Death:
Technologies and Imaginaries for Terror and Killing. Durham: Duke University
Press, 2013.
Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A. M. Sheridan
Smith. London: Tavistock Publications, 1972.
———. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan

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 Macat Analysis of Edward Said’s Orientalism

Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1975.

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Guha, Ranajit, ed. A Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986–1995. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2000.
Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World
Order. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.
Kandiyoti, Deniz, ed. Women, Islam and the State. Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1991.
Lewis, Bernard. “The Question of Orientalism.” New York Review of Books,
June 24, 1982.
Ludden, David. Reading Subaltern Studies: Critical History, Contested
Meaning, and the Globalization of South Asia. London: Anthem Press, 2002.
Mamdani, Mahmood. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and
the Roots of Terror. New York: Pantheon Books, 2004.
Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized. London: The Orion Press,
1965.
Puar, Jasbir and Amit Rai. “Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and
the Production of Docile Patriots.” Social Text 20, no. 3 (2002): 117–48.
Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
Razzaz, Munif and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod. The Evolution of the Meaning of
Nationalism. New York: Doubleday, 1963.
Said, Edward. Beginnings: Intentions and Method. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1985.
———. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We
See the Rest of the World. New York: Vintage Books, 1997.
———. Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1966.
———. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1978.

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 Works Cited

———. Out of Place: A Memoir. New York: Knopf, 1999.

———. The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-
Determination 1969–1994. New York: Pantheon Books, 1994.
———. The Question of Palestine. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
———. “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims.” Social Text 1 (1979),
7–58.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the
Interpretation of Culture: International Conference: Selected Papers, edited by
Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1988.
Stoler, Ann Laura. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the
Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
———. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and
the Colonial Order of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.
Weiss, Max. In the Shadow of Sectarianism: Law, Shi`ism, and the Making of
Modern Lebanon. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010.

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 THE MACAT LIBRARY
BY DISCIPLINE

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 The Macat Library By Discipline

AFRICANA STUDIES
Chinua Achebe’s An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk
Zora Neale Huston’s Characteristics of Negro Expression
Martin Luther King Jr’s Why We Can’t Wait
Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the American Literary Imagination

ANTHROPOLOGY
Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation
Philippe Ariès’s Centuries of Childhood
Franz Boas’s Race, Language and Culture
Kim Chan & Renée Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy
Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs & Steel: the Fate of Human Societies
Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive
E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande
James Ferguson’s The Anti-Politics Machine
Clifford Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures
David Graeber’s Debt: the First 5000 Years
Karen Ho’s Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street
Geert Hofstede’s Culture’s Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutes and
Organizations across Nations
Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Structural Anthropology
Jay Macleod’s Ain’t No Makin’ It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood
Saba Mahmood’s The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject
Marcel Mauss’s The Gift

BUSINESS
Jean Lave & Etienne Wenger’s Situated Learning
Theodore Levitt’s Marketing Myopia
Burton G. Malkiel’s A Random Walk Down Wall Street
Douglas McGregor’s The Human Side of Enterprise
Michael Porter’s Competitive Strategy: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance
John Kotter’s Leading Change
C. K. Prahalad & Gary Hamel’s The Core Competence of the Corporation

CRIMINOLOGY
Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
Michael R. Gottfredson & Travis Hirschi’s A General Theory of Crime
Richard Herrnstein & Charles A. Murray’s The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in
American Life
Elizabeth Loftus’s Eyewitness Testimony
Jay Macleod’s Ain’t No Makin’ It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood
Philip Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect

ECONOMICS
Janet Abu-Lughod’s Before European Hegemony
Ha-Joon Chang’s Kicking Away the Ladder
David Brion Davis’s The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution
Milton Friedman’s The Role of Monetary Policy
Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom
David Graeber’s Debt: the First 5000 Years
Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom
Karen Ho’s Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street

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 The Macat Library By Discipline

John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
Charles P. Kindleberger’s Manias, Panics and Crashes
Robert Lucas’s Why Doesn’t Capital Flow from Rich to Poor Countries?
Burton G. Malkiel’s A Random Walk Down Wall Street
Thomas Robert Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population
Karl Marx’s Capital
Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Amartya Sen’s Development as Freedom
Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations
Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Amos Tversky’s & Daniel Kahneman’s Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases
Mahbub Ul Haq’s Reflections on Human Development
Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

FEMINISM AND GENDER STUDIES

Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble
Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex
Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality
Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique
Saba Mahmood’s The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject
Joan Wallach Scott’s Gender and the Politics of History
Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women
Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own

GEOGRAPHY
The Brundtland Report’s Our Common Future
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring
Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species
James Ferguson’s The Anti-Politics Machine
Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities
James Lovelock’s Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth
Amartya Sen’s Development as Freedom
Mathis Wackernagel & William Rees’s Our Ecological Footprint

HISTORY
Janet Abu-Lughod’s Before European Hegemony
Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities
Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
Hanna Batatu’s The Old Social Classes And The Revolutionary Movements Of Iraq
Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Batallion 101 and the Final Solution in
Poland
Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France
William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago And The Great West
Alfred W. Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange
Hamid Dabashi’s Iran: A People Interrupted
David Brion Davis’s The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution
Nathalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre
Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs & Steel: the Fate of Human Societies
Frank Dikotter’s Mao’s Great Famine
John W Dower’s War Without Mercy: Race And Power In The Pacific War
W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk
Richard J. Evans’s In Defence of History
Lucien Febvre’s The Problem of Unbelief in the 16th Century
Sheila Fitzpatrick’s Everyday Stalinism

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Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish
Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality
Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man
John Lewis Gaddis’s We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History
Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism
Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made
Carlo Ginzburg’s The Night Battles
Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners
Jack Goldstone’s Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World
Antonio Gramsci’s The Prison Notebooks
Alexander Hamilton, John Jay & James Madison’s The Federalist Papers
Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down
Carole Hillenbrand’s The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives
Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan
Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age Of Revolution
John A. Hobson’s Imperialism: A Study
Albert Hourani’s History of the Arab Peoples
Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins
Tony Judt’s Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology
Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
Ian Kershaw’s The “Hitler Myth”: Image and Reality in the Third Reich
John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
Charles P. Kindleberger’s Manias, Panics and Crashes
Martin Luther King Jr’s Why We Can’t Wait
Henry Kissinger’s World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History
Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Georges Lefebvre’s The Coming of the French Revolution
John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government
Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince
Thomas Robert Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population
Mahmood Mamdani’s Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa And The Legacy Of Late
Colonialism
Karl Marx’s Capital
Stanley Milgram’s Obedience to Authority
John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty
Thomas Paine’s Common Sense
Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man
Geoffrey Parker’s Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth
Century
Jonathan Riley-Smith’s The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract
Joan Wallach Scott’s Gender and the Politics of History
Theda Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions
Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations
Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
Sun Tzu’s The Art of War
Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic
Thucydides’s The History of the Peloponnesian War
Frederick Jackson Turner’s The Significance of the Frontier in American History
Odd Arne Westad’s The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions And The Making Of Our Times

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LITERATURE
Chinua Achebe’s An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
Roland Barthes’s Mythologies
Homi K. Bhabha’s The Location of Culture
Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble
Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex
Ferdinand De Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics
T. S. Eliot’s The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism
Zora Neale Huston’s Characteristics of Negro Expression
Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the American Literary Imagination
Edward Said’s Orientalism
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak?
Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women
Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own

PHILOSOPHY
Elizabeth Anscombe’s Modern Moral Philosophy
Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition
Aristotle’s Metaphysics
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
Edmund Gettier’s Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
David Hume’s The Enquiry for Human Understanding
Immanuel Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason
Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
Søren Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death
Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling
C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man
Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue
Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations
Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality
Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil
Plato’s Republic
Plato’s Symposium
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract
Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind
Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics
Sun Tzu’s The Art of War
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations

POLITICS
Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities
Aristotle’s Politics
Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France
John C. Calhoun’s A Disquisition on Government
Ha-Joon Chang’s Kicking Away the Ladder
Hamid Dabashi’s Iran: A People Interrupted
Hamid Dabashi’s Theology of Discontent: The Ideological Foundation of the Islamic Revolution
in Iran
Robert Dahl’s Democracy and its Critics
Robert Dahl’s Who Governs?
David Brion Davis’s The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution

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Alexis De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America

James Ferguson’s The Anti-Politics Machine
Frank Dikotter’s Mao’s Great Famine
Sheila Fitzpatrick’s Everyday Stalinism
Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877
Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom
Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man
John Lewis Gaddis’s We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History
Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism
David Graeber’s Debt: the First 5000 Years
Antonio Gramsci’s The Prison Notebooks
Alexander Hamilton, John Jay & James Madison’s The Federalist Papers
Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom
Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down
Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan
John A. Hobson’s Imperialism: A Study
Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
Tony Judt’s Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
David C. Kang’s China Rising: Peace, Power and Order in East Asia
Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of Great Powers
Robert Keohane’s After Hegemony
Martin Luther King Jr.’s Why We Can’t Wait
Henry Kissinger’s World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History
John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government
Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince
Thomas Robert Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population
Mahmood Mamdani’s Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa And The Legacy Of
Late Colonialism
Karl Marx’s Capital
John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty
John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism
Hans Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations
Thomas Paine’s Common Sense
Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man
Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Robert D. Putman’s Bowling Alone
John Rawls’s Theory of Justice
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract
Theda Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions
Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations
Sun Tzu’s The Art of War
Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience
Thucydides’s The History of the Peloponnesian War
Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics
Max Weber’s Politics as a Vocation
Odd Arne Westad’s The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions And The Making Of Our Times

POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES
Roland Barthes’s Mythologies
Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks
Homi K. Bhabha’s The Location of Culture
Gustavo Gutiérrez’s A Theology of Liberation
Edward Said’s Orientalism
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak?

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PSYCHOLOGY
Gordon Allport’s The Nature of Prejudice
Alan Baddeley & Graham Hitch’s Aggression: A Social Learning Analysis
Albert Bandura’s Aggression: A Social Learning Analysis
Leon Festinger’s A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance
Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams
Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique
Michael R. Gottfredson & Travis Hirschi’s A General Theory of Crime
Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements
William James’s Principles of Psychology
Elizabeth Loftus’s Eyewitness Testimony
A. H. Maslow’s A Theory of Human Motivation
Stanley Milgram’s Obedience to Authority
Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature
Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat
Richard Thaler & Cass Sunstein’s Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and
Happiness
Amos Tversky’s Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases
Philip Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect

SCIENCE
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring
William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago And The Great West
Alfred W. Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange
Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species
Richard Dawkin’s The Selfish Gene
Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Geoffrey Parker’s Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth
Century
Mathis Wackernagel & William Rees’s Our Ecological Footprint

SOCIOLOGY
Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
Gordon Allport’s The Nature of Prejudice
Albert Bandura’s Aggression: A Social Learning Analysis
Hanna Batatu’s The Old Social Classes And The Revolutionary Movements Of Iraq
Ha-Joon Chang’s Kicking Away the Ladder
W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk
Émile Durkheim’s On Suicide
Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks
Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth
Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877
Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made
Jack Goldstone’s Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World
Antonio Gramsci’s The Prison Notebooks
Richard Herrnstein & Charles A Murray’s The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in
American Life
Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements
Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Robert Lucas’s Why Doesn’t Capital Flow from Rich to Poor Countries?
Jay Macleod’s Ain’t No Makin’ It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low Income Neighborhood
Elaine May’s Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era
Douglas McGregor’s The Human Side of Enterprise
C. Wright Mills’s The Sociological Imagination

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Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Robert D. Putman’s Bowling Alone
David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character
Edward Said’s Orientalism
Joan Wallach Scott’s Gender and the Politics of History
Theda Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions
Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

THEOLOGY
Augustine’s Confessions
Benedict’s Rule of St Benedict
Gustavo Gutiérrez’s A Theology of Liberation
Carole Hillenbrand’s The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives
David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
Immanuel Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason
Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology
Søren Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death
C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man
Saba Mahmood’s The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject
Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics
Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic

COMING SOON
Chris Argyris’s The Individual and the Organisation
Seyla Benhabib’s The Rights of Others
Walter Benjamin’s The Work Of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
John Berger’s Ways of Seeing
Pierre Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice
Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger
Roland Dworkin’s Taking Rights Seriously
James G. March’s Exploration and Exploitation in Organisational Learning
Ikujiro Nonaka’s A Dynamic Theory of Organizational Knowledge Creation
Griselda Pollock’s Vision and Difference
Amartya Sen’s Inequality Re-Examined
Susan Sontag’s On Photography
Yasser Tabbaa’s The Transformation of Islamic Art
Ludwig von Mises’s Theory of Money and Credit

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