On a visit to Beirut during the terrible civil war of1
1975-1976 a French journalist wrote regretfully of the gutted
downtown area that “it had once seemed to belong to the
Orient of Chateaubriand and Nerval”. He was right about the4
place, of course, especially so far as a European was
concerned. The Orient was almost a European invention, and
had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings,7
haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences.
Now it was disappearing; in a sense it had happened, its time
was over.10
Americans will not feel quite the same about the
Orient, which for them is much more likely to be associated
very differently with the Far East (China and Japan, mainly).13
Unlike the Americans, the French and the British — less so the
Germans, Russians, Spanish, Portuguese, Italians, and Swiss —
have had a long tradition of what I shall be calling Orientalism,16
a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the
Orient’s special place in European Western experience. The
Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of19
Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of
its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one
of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other. In22
addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West)
as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. The
Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and25
culture. Orientalism expresses and represents that part
culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with
supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery,28
doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles. In
contrast, the American understanding of the Orient will seem
considerably less dense.31
To speak of Orientalism therefore is to speak mainly,
although not exclusively, of a British and French cultural
enterprise, a project whose dimensions take in such disparate34
realms as the imagination itself, the whole of India and the
Levant, the spice trade, colonial armies and a long tradition of
colonial administrators, a formidable scholarly corpus,37
innumerable Oriental “experts” and “hands”, an Oriental
professorate, many Eastern sects, philosophies, and wisdoms
domesticated for local European use — the list can be40
extended more or less indefinitely. From the beginning of the
nineteenth century until the end of World War II, France and
Britain dominated the Orient and Orientalism; since World43
War II America has dominated the Orient, and approaches it as
France and Britain once did. Out of that closeness, whose
dynamic is enormously productive even if it always46
demonstrates the comparatively greater strength of the
Occident (British, French, or American), comes the large body
of texts I call Orientalist.49
E. W. Said. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978, p. 1-4 (adapted).