The Collaborative International Dictionary
Orientalism \O`ri*en"tal*ism\, n. [Cf. F. orientalisme.]
Any system, doctrine, custom, expression, etc., peculiar to Oriental people.
Knowledge or use of Oriental languages, history, literature, etc.
--London Quart. Rev.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Wiktionary
n. In the figurative arts, the tendency to represent eastern subjects, to assume stylistical characteristics original of the East.
Wikipedia
Orientalism is a term used by scholars in art history, literary, geography, and cultural studies for the depiction of Eastern, that is "Oriental" cultures, including Middle Eastern, North African, South Asian and Southeast Asian cultures, done by writers, designers, and artists from the West. In particular, Orientalist painting depicting "the Middle East" was a genre of 19th-century Academic art. The literature of Western countries took a similar interest in Oriental themes. It is also used for the use of Asian styles in Western art, especially in architecture and the decorative arts.
Since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism in 1978, much academic discourse has used the term "Orientalism" in a more restricted sense, to characterize a perceived patronizing Western attitude towards Near Eastern societies that is used to justify Western imperialism. In Said's analysis, the West essentializes these societies as static and undeveloped—thereby fabricating a view of Oriental culture that can be studied, depicted, and reproduced. Implicit in this fabrication, writes Said, is the idea that Western society is developed, rational, flexible, and superior, while Oriental societies embody the opposite values.
Orientalism is a 1978 book by Edward W. Said, in which Said studies the cultural representations that are the bases of Orientalism, the West's patronizing perceptions and fictional depictions of " The East" — the societies and peoples who inhabit the places of Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East. Orientalism, the Western scholarship about the Eastern World, was and remains inextricably tied to the imperialist societies who produced it, which makes much Orientalist work inherently political and servile to power, and thus intellectually suspect.
In the Middle East, the social, economic, and cultural practices of the ruling Arab élites indicate they are imperial satraps who have internalized the romanticized " Arab Culture" created by French, British and, later, American Orientalists; the examples include critical analyses of the colonial literature of Joseph Conrad, which conflates a people, a time, and a place into a narrative of incident and adventure in an exotic land.
The critical application of post-structuralism in the scholarship of Orientalism influenced the development of literary theory, cultural criticism, and the field of Middle Eastern studies, especially regarding how academics practice their intellectual enquiry when examining, describing, and explaining the Middle East. The scope of Said's scholarship established Orientalism as a foundation text in the field of Post-colonial Culture Studies, which examines the denotations and connotations of Orientalism, and the history of a country's post-colonial period.
As a public intellectual, Edward Said debated Orientalism with historians and scholars of area studies, notably, the Orientalist and historian Bernard Lewis, who said that the thesis of Orientalism was “anti-Western”. For subsequent editions of Orientalism, Said wrote an "Afterword" (1995) and a "Preface" (2003) addressing criticisms of the content, substance, and style of the work as cultural criticism.
Usage examples of "orientalism".
The point is that even if it does not survive as it once did, Orientalism lives on academically through its doctrines and theses about the Orient and the Oriental.
The whole middle expanse of Asia was not academically conquered for Orientalism until, during the later eighteenth century, Anquetil-Duperron and Sir William Jones were able intelligibly to reveal the extraordinary riches of Avestan and Sanskrit.
Islamic Orientalism between the wars shared in the general sense of cultural crisis adumbrated by Auerbach and the others I have spoken of briefly, without at the same time developing in the same way as the other human sciences.
Orientalism has been subjected to imperialism, positivism, utopianism, historicism, Darwinism, racism, Freudianism, Marxism, Spenglerism.
Orientalist generalizations, we find ourselves having to consider the process of lexicographical and institutional consolidation peculiar to Orientalism.
We may well wonder whether this new autonomy within the culture was the freedom Renan hoped his philological Orientalist science would bring or whether, so far as a critical historian of Orientalism is concerned, it set up a complex affiliation between Orientalism and its putative human subject matter that is based finally on power and not really on disinterested objectivity.
For within the comparative field that Orientalism became after the philological revolution of the early nineteenth century, and outside it, either in popular stereotypes or in the figures made of the Orient by philosophers like Carlyle and stereotypes like those of Macaulay, the Orient in itself was subordinated intellectually to the West.
Yet Berger stands also for the most current transformation overtaking Orientalism: its conversion from a fundamentally philological discipline and a vaguely general apprehension of the Orient into a social science specialty.
But there was no deeply invested tradition of Orientalism, and consequently in the United States knowledge of the Orient never passed through the refining and reticulating and reconstructing processes, whose beginning was in philological study, that it went through in Europe.
Renan, it was his adaptation of Orientalism to philology and both of them to the intellectual culture of his time that perpetuated the Orientalist structures intellectually and gave them greater visibility.
Orientalism from philology, and it is the extraordinarily rich and celebrated cultural position of that discipline that endowed Orientalism with its most important technical characteristics.
What is distinctive about the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which is where this study assumes modern Orientalism to have begun, is that an Oriental renaissance took place, as Edgar Quinet phrased it.
Orientalism staked its existence, not upon its openness, its receptivity to the Orient, but rather on its internal, repetitious consistency about its constitutive will-to-power over the Orient.
Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles.
To investigate Orientalism is also to propose intellectual ways for handling the methodological problems that history has brought forward, so to speak, in its subject matter, the Orient.