Relevance of Orientalism Today: Theory & Practice

Abstract

Orientalism has basically come as a reaction against the Western Intellectual manipulation. It pinpoints, through many references, how a perspective of condescendence was held towards East in terms of socio¬political and economic imperialism. Has the world been really polarized between East and West? If it is politically so, intellectuals will propagate the theory in the manifestation of their innumerable hypothetical stands. If Orientalism is an attempt of reconstructing the understanding of East, it certainly is an intellectual imperialism, the age that follows the political colonization of the West. If we sum up Said's view, we roughly get a perspective that Orientalism is an imposed and deliberately misconstrued way of understanding a set of people. This paper attempts to show how oriental attitude that was constructed by the Westerners has been working in the context of modern political and intellectual arena, and how a newer understanding and a reconstructed definition has been imposed upon the Orientals, more significantly the Middle Easterners and Muslims rather than the Far Easterners.