Thursday, May 3, 2012

Edward W Said

The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of 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 Oter. In addition the orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience.

    Orientalism is a structure created by western power, colonism. It has two meanings: From the linguistic study, culture and anthropology, orient and occient are distinct. From the politics, the overstatement of West about their own opinion or idea of Orient "represents part culturally and even ideologically", but not the actual one. In his work, middle-east exemplifies orientalism----for western people, it expresses either the oil provider or the potential terrorism. Thus, the orientalism is an incomplete perspective by the west which is controlled by the idea of procolonism.

    Besides, Said has the flaw on his theory---- he only focus on the middle-esat as the Orient. However, the middle-east can only represent part of orient. Therefore, in my opinion, he overlook the other part of asia to work on his theory.

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