ABSTRACT
For the study of Western imaginative geography, it is difficult to overestimate the influence of Edward Said’s Orientalism, a work that did much to create the critical school of colonial discourse analysis. It was here that Said first demystified “Anglo-French-American” (17) representations of the Islamic Middle East and North Africa, viewing their binaristic constructs not as empirically grounded but as an institutionalized, cumulative tradition of textual statements which have channelled and controlled Western knowledge of the Orient from the eighteenth century onwards. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s conjunction of knowledge and power, Said also considered such representation a performative discourse which advances Western imperial supremacy in the region. It was in reference to Foucault, for example, that Said summarized orientalism “as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient,” lamenting how “European or Western knowledge about the Orient [is] synonymous with European domination” (3, 197). Naturally, the thirty years since the publication of Orientalism have seen challenges to Said’s original thesis. Feminism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis and Marxism have questioned his line of inquiry, revealing orientalism to be less fixed and monolithic than Said suggested. 1 Yet the work’s status remains unimpaired. Orientalism not only continues to inform critical analyses of Western views of the Middle East, with few studies not using Said as a starting point of discussion, but also informs scholarship on Western representations of other parts of the world.
