The greatest intellectual impact of Orientalism (1978) was upon the fields of literary theory, cultural studies, history, and human geography, by way of which originated the field of Post-colonial studies. Edward Said's method of post-structuralist analysis derived from the analytic techniques of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault; and the perspectives to Orientalism presented by Abdul Latif Tibawi,[19] Anouar Abdel-Malek,[20] Maxime Rodinson,[21] and Richard William Southern.[22]
Post-colonial culture studies
As a work of cultural criticism, Orientalism (1978) is a foundational document in the field of postcolonialism, providing a framework and method of analysis to answer the how? and the why? of the cultural representations of "Orientals," "The Orient," and "The Eastern world," as presented in the mass-media of the Western world.[23]
Postcolonial theory studies the power and continued dominance of Western ways of intellectual enquiry, as well as the production of knowledge in the academic, intellectual, and cultural spheres of decolonised countries. Said's survey concentrated upon the British and the French varieties of Orientalism that supported the British Empire and the French Empire as commercial enterprises constructed from colonialism, and gave perfunctory coverage, discussion, and analyses of German Orientalist scholarship.[24]
Such disproportional investigation provoked criticism from opponents and embarrassment for supporters of Said, who, in "Orientalism Reconsidered" (1985), said that no single opponent provided a rationale, by which limited coverage of German Orientalism limits either the scholarly value or the practical application of Orientalism as a cultural study.[25] In the Afterword to the 1995 edition of Orientalism, Said presented follow-up refutations of the criticisms that the Orientalist and historian Bernard Lewis made against the book's first edition (1978).[6]: 329–54
Literary criticism
The philosopher and theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak wrote the essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" which also is a foundational post-colonialism documentIn the fields of literary criticism and of cultural studies, the notable Indian scholars of postcolonialism were Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, 1987), whose essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1988) also became a foundational text of postcolonial culture studies;[26] Homi K. Bhabha (Nation and Narration, 1990);[27] Ronald Inden (Imagining India, 1990);[28] Gyan Prakash ("Writing Post–Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography", 1990);[29] Nicholas Dirks (Castes of Mind, 2001);[30] and Hamid Dabashi (Iran: A People Interrupted, 2007).
In White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (1990), Robert J. C. Young reports post-colonial explanations of the "How?" and the "Why?" of the nature of the post-colonial world, the peoples, and their discontents;[31][32] which verify the efficacy of the critical method applied in Orientalism (1978), especially in the field of Middle Eastern studies.[3]
In the late 1970s, the survey range of Orientalism (1978) did not include the genre of Orientalist painting or any other visual arts, despite the book-cover featuring a detail-image of The Snake Charmer (1880), a popular, 19th-century Orientalist painting—to which the writer Linda Nochlin applied Said's method of critical analysis "with uneven results."[33] In the field of epistemological studies, Orientalism is an extended application of methods of critical analysis developed by the philosopher Michel Foucault.[34] Anthropologist Talal Asad said that the book Orientalism is:
not only a catalogue of Western prejudices about and misrepresentations of Arabs and Muslims" ... [but an investigation and analysis of the] authoritative structure of Orientalist discourse—the closed, self-evident, self-confirming character of that distinctive discourse, which is reproduced, again and again, through scholarly texts, travelogues, literary works of imagination, and the obiter dicta of public men-of-affairs.[35]
Historian Gyan Prakash said that Orientalism describes how "the hallowed image of the Orientalist, as an austere figure, unconcerned with the world and immersed in the mystery of foreign scripts and languages, has acquired a dark hue as the murky business of ruling other peoples, now forms the essential and enabling background of his or her scholarship" about the Orient; without colonial imperialism, there would be no Orientalism.[36]
Oriental Europe
In Eastern Europe, Milica Bakić-Hayden developed the concept of Nesting Orientalisms (1992), based upon and derived from the work of the historian Larry Wolff (Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment, 1994), and the ideas Said presents in Orientalism (1978).[37]
Bulgarian historian Maria Todorova (Imagining the Balkans, 1997) presented her ethnologic concept of Nesting Balkanisms (Ethnologia Balkanica,1997), which is thematically extended and theoretically derived from Bakić-Hayden's Nesting Orientalisms.[38]
Moreover, in "A Stereotype, Wrapped in a Cliché, Inside a Caricature: Russian Foreign Policy and Orientalism" (2010), James D. J. Brown says that Western stereotypes of Russia, Russianness, and things Russian are cultural representations derived from the literature of "Russian studies," which is a field of enquiry little afflicted with the misconceptions of Russia-as-the-Other, but does display the characteristics of Orientalism—the exaggeration of difference, the presumption of Western cultural superiority, and the application of cliché in analytical models. That overcoming such intellectual malaise requires that area scholars choose to break their "mind-forg'd manacles" and deeply reflect upon the basic cultural assumptions of their area-studies scholarship.[39]
