E 205 • EDWARD SAID • INTRODUCTION TO
ORIENTALISM
• 1 OF 24
Orientalism
(1977)
Edward Said
Introduction
I
On a visit to Beirut during the terrible civil war of 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
.”
1
He was right about
the 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, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable
experiences
. Now it was disappearing; in a sense it had happened, its time was
over. Perhaps it seemed irrelevant that Orientals themselves had something at
stake in the process, that even in the time of
Chateaubriand
and
Nerval
Orientals had lived there, and that now it was they who were suffering
; the main
thing for the European visitor was a European representation of the Orient
and its
contemporary fate
,
both
of which had a privileged communal significance for the
journalist and his French readers.
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). 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
,
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 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 other
. In addition,
the Orient has helped to
define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality,
experience
.
Yet none of this Orient is merely imaginative
.
The Orient is an
integral part of European
material
civilization and culture
.
Orientalism
expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a
mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship,
imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles
. In contrast,
the
American
understanding of the Orient will seem considerably less dense,
although our recent Japanese, Korean, and Indochinese adventures ought now to
be creating a more sober, more realistic “Oriental” awareness
. Moreover, the
vastly expanded American political and economic role in the Near East (the
Middle East) makes great claims on our understanding of that Orient.
It will be clear to the reader (and will become clearer still throughout the
many pages that follow) that by
Orientalism
I mean several things, all of them,
in my opinion, interdependent
. The most readily accepted designation for
Orientalism is an academic one
, and indeed the label still serves in a number of
Both belonged to
the French
Romanticism:
• François
‐
René
Chateaubriand
(1768
‐
