Orientalism and Literature

Orientalism is a term that has multiple meanings. One is a style in the arts, another concerns westerners’ study and ways of viewing the East involving practitioners who made a career of studying eastern languages. However, after the publication in 1978 of a widely influential book entitled Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient by Palestinian American intellectual Edward Said, the term suddenly acquired huge cultural and political significance. A professor of comparative literature, Said was strongly criticized for writing about fields in which he was not a specialist and for adopting a post-structuralist approach that grew out of the anti-enlightenment French philosopher Michel Foucault’s post-Marxist formulations of power and its relation to discourse together with – some have argued – the incompatible notion of resistance propounded by Italian re-visionary Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Orientalism and Literature has forty years of critical debate to draw upon and there are a wide range of perspectives that it might have investigated. No great emphasis is placed in this collection of essays on a need to revisit in detail previously debated criticisms of Said, although the volume does end with very different estimates of Orientalism’s significance into the future by two academics working from former Marxist positions.