Edward Said's Orientalism, published in 1978, is a critical study and evaluation of the intellectual conventions which Westerners have created to describe the East. The following essay will examine some major reviews of Said's work, but in order to place these reviews in perspective, it is necessary to say something of Said's work itself.
That the East (and its opposite, West) are in this context almost instantly recognizable is itself a demonstration in microcosm of Said's central proposition. The only ambiguities, for the American reader, are whether the terms refer to internal American geography, or perhaps to "West" and "East" in the Cold War sense. Once these alternatives are disposed of the reader knows at once that what is intended is a distinction between a cultural "West," incorporating Europe and North America, and a cultural "East" extending from the Arab world (part of which, Morocco, is actually farther west than any part of Europe) on to China and Japan. In short, the West and East of which Kipling said "never the twain shall meet."
More specifically, Said is writing about Western conventions in dealing with the Arab and Islamic worlds, the "Middle East" in conventional American usage. Said observes that to Americans, Orient refers primarily to East Asia, mainly China and Japan (1978, p. 1), but Orientalism, devoted primarily to the Arab-Islamic world, secondarily to India, and only least to the Far East, is a long-standing usage in the Western intellectual tradition. Orientalism in 19th century art, for example, refers distinctly to Middle Eastern themes and imagery, not East Asian ones.
This is the Orient that has been active in Western imagination since Greek times; the Orient conveyed by expressions like Oriental despotism, or Marx's Oriental mode of production (1978, pp. 31-32). It is Said's argument that this Orient has not simply been active in the Western imagination, but has been constructe...