Chapter 14 - From Orientalism to Islamophobia

Summary

Edward W. Said’s Orientalism effected a radical transformation in the social sciences and humanities in the late 20^th century by changing the meaning of “Orientalism” from the benevolent western subject’s human interest in the East to an apparatus of knowledge and writing aligned with western imperial power.¹Said’s coupling of western power with knowledge was a direct intervention into the writing of the universal and transparent grand historical narrative which culminated in the modern West. Orientalism was ostensibly a discourse of western “expertise” on the “East”, its lands, cultures and peoples; but, from Said’s critical perspective, it was about the West and its power of writing the world in accord with its own interests and rule, and producing itself as the universal subject of knowledge, reason and civilization. Said’s original insight implied a powerful sense of the production of the Orient as a vast area of knowledge and governance, while at the same time he saw this production as an imaginative geography, which distorted a supposedly real Orient and created a phantasmatic idea of it. As his best critics underlined however, Said’s analysis involved a methodological contradiction between two different concepts of Orientalism: one in which Orient is constructed as real and another one in which its reality is distorted.