Edward Said
Literary critic (1935 to 2003) whose Orientalism (1978) argued that Western scholarship and art about the East were bound up with Western power over it.
Edward Said did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
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Our reading
Their wordsThe Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences.
↗Orientalism (Pantheon, 1978)archive.org All 6 from this book
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Our reading
Their wordsthe Orient is not an inert fact of nature.
↗Orientalism (Pantheon, 1978)archive.org All 6 from this book
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Their wordsThe relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony
↗Orientalism (Pantheon, 1978)archive.org All 6 from this book
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Our reading
Orientalism is a political doctrine imposed on the Orient because it was weaker than the West
Their wordsOrientalism is fundamentally a political doctrine willed over the Orient because the Orient was weaker than the West
↗Orientalism (Pantheon, 1978)archive.org All 6 from this book
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Their wordsevery European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.
↗Orientalism (Pantheon, 1978)archive.org All 6 from this book
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Their wordsToo often literature and culture are presumed to be politically, even historically innocent; it has regularly seemed otherwise to me
↗Orientalism (Pantheon, 1978)archive.org All 6 from this book