Research Essay: Portrayal of China in Western Media

“Orientalism”

Said, E. (1994) “Orientalism: 25th Anniversary Edition”, New York:Vintage

Books.

THE FOLLOWING ARE EXCERPTS FROM THE “INTRODUCTION” TO SAID’S “ORIENTALISM”.

“Unlike the Americans, the French and British--less so the Germans, Russians,

Spanish, Portugese, Italians, and Swiss--have had a long tradition of what I shall

be calling Orientalism, a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on

the Orient's special place in European Western Experience. The Orient is not only

adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe's greatest and richest and oldest

colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and

one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other. In addition, the Orient

has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea,

personality, experience. Yet none of this Orient is merely imaginative. The Orient

is an integral part of European material civilization and culture. Orientalism

expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a mode of

discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery,

doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial style.

It will be clear to the reader...that by Orientalism I mean several things, all of

them, in my opinion, interdependent. The most readily accepted designation for

Orientalism is an academic one, and indeed the label still serves in a number of

academic institutions. Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the

Orient--and this applies whether the person is an anthropologist, sociologist,

historian, or philologist--either in its specific or its general aspects, is an

Orientalist, and what he or she says or does is Orientalism.

Related to this academic tradition, whose fortunes, transmigrations,

specializations, and transmissions are in part the subject of this study, is a more

general meaning for Orientalism. Orientalism is a style of thought based upon

ontological and epistemological distinction made between "the Orient" and

(most of the time) "the Occident." Thus a very large mass of writers, among who

are poet, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial

administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the

starting point for elaborate accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs,

"mind," destiny, and so on.

The phenomenon of Orientalism as I study it here deals principally, not with a

correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the internal

consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient . . despite or beyond

any corrsespondence, or lack thereof, with a "real" Orient.