Orientalism

Abstract

AbstractOrientalism can refer to any of three related phenomena. Political theorists usually use the term to refer to Edward Said's theorization that negative western images of and ideas about the east both produced, and were products of, forces of political and economic domination. However there are two more specific, and related, referents of the term. First, Orientalism was a movement of eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century European scholarship about the languages, literatures, religions, laws, and traditions of “the Orient.” Second, Orientalism may refer to an artistic movement and related trend in material culture, predominantly of the nineteenth century, in which “Oriental” subjects, themes, and artifacts predominated. Most significant for political theory, and so treated in this entry, are Said's theorization of Orientalism and the Orientalist scholarly movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the related artistic movement, less important for the purposes of this entry, will not be further discussed.