ABSTRACT
Why is it that most, if not all, societies make such sharp distinctions between who is considered normal and who is considered different? All of the pieces in this section deal with this question; in particular, however, the selections by Edward Said and David Sibley address the question in the most encompassing ways. Said develops the notion of Orientalism, which he defines as the West’s longstanding practice of defining the East (or Orient, though Said concentrates particularly on Muslim Southwest Asia/North Africa) as radically unlike the Christian West in all meaningful ways. Sibley uses object relations theory, derived from psychoanalytic theory, to suggest that as individuals and as societies we establish our identity through a process of exclusion, through specifying and then spatially marginalizing those we determine to be different from ourselves. Though they take different intellectual routes to do so, both Said and Sibley are describing the Other. The notion of the Other is used together with its counterpart, the Self, to arrive at the dyad of Self and Other which, for many scholars across the social sciences and humanities, is the basis of identity formation. Central to establishing a firm sense of Self is what may seem at first glance the rather backward process of establishing a firm sense of what the Self is not: in other words, specifying who the Other is. These notions are central to postcolonial studies, which draw largely on foundational work by scholars from formerly colonized places – such as Edward Said – who explore how Western identity formation has often violently turned on the establishment, and subsequent marginalization, of the Other.
