ABSTRACT
The question of Orientalism, as everyone knows, has been the subject of intense debate in the last quarter century. Orientalism has met with unique fortune. The culmination of several decades of critical research, the book has served as the point of departure for new contributions by authors from different parts of the planet—and not only from the territories, nations, and ethnic groups that have endured the centuries-old expansion of Europe and of Europe’s extensions. The term Orientalism is reserved in certain sectors for describing a distorted way to encounter phenomena pertaining to other cultures or civilizations, or to peoples, still subjugated or only recently liberated, located for the most part to the east of Europe. Of course, in general terms, for half a century critics have denounced bias in the study of other cultures, demonstrating that such biases are not gratuitous, but, rather, that they work toward specific ends of subjugation and exploitation.
