ABSTRACT
The idea of this essay takes its start from Said’s Orientalism, 1 where I found the seeds of Occidentalism, both as a concept and as a natural reaction of the people of the Orient to the host of stereotypes and (mis)representations which were created and propagated by some Orientalists about an Orient they often did not know very well. It is the aim of this essay to ponder the concept of ‘Occidentalism’ and its multifarious meanings as defined by critics from both the Orient and the Occident, with a special focus on the Maghrebi experience of the East–West encounter which ultimately resulted in the creation of an Occidentalist discourse in the Maghreb.
