Essays on Orientalism

In the prologue and introduction to “Orientalism” the following clarifications are made: “Orientalism isn’t an insignificant topic or field that has not been given the attention it needs by the culture, institution, or scholarship; and neither is it a vast and diverse collection of writings...

Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia New Cultural Studies, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 1993 is a collection of articles. Most of these articles were originally delivered at the University of Pennsylvania’s 1988-1989 Annual South Asia Seminar, as papers...

In both his poem ‘Kubla Khan’ and its accompanying prologue Samuel Taylor Coleridge presents two ideas: the variable nature of the imagination and the beauty of the foreign and exotic. Many scholars view the story behind the poem’s composition as not only one of the...

In October 1937, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina—one of Latin America’s most brutal dictators—directly ordered the execution of all Haitians then living in the Spanish-speaking Dominican Republic. People suspected of being Haitian were asked to pronounce the Spanish word for parsley (“perejil”). If the suspect failed...

Orientalism Samuel Huntington predicts The Clash of Civilizations. He believes that as this world gets smaller and smaller, cultural communication becomes more and more inevitable and therefore more conflicts will arise and as a result, more compromises with cultural values will have to be made....

Edward Said may not be the most controversial figure in academia, but he certainly made waves when he founded the entirely new academic field of postcolonial studies. A professor of literature by training, Said’s influence extended into many different academic fields during his time. None...

Western perspectives of areas outside of Europe are, more often than not, filtered through a lens of fantasy and imagination. This manner of examining the east is known as Orientalism, a word that Edward Said defines as the “constellation of ideas” that present eastern lands...