Orientalism And Orientation

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The Orient is not only one place or image, yet it is a place that depends on one’s personal settings. The Orient is both geographical and imagined, the geographical Orient is the location of the Orient and the borders it has. Yet the Orient does not have real borders, as when mentioning the Orient, it can be about India, but also about Egypt. Sometimes when talking about the Orient it is about the Ottoman Empire, which at high tide stretched from the west as Algeria and went into Europe, almost able to siege Vienna. However, the Orient often includes central Arab in the idea the geographical Orient is. These Examples show that the geographical Orient is not one place, but a widespread area, which does not always include every one of the area’s…show more content…
Orientalism deals with the representation of the Orient by mainly French and English Europeans in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. Orientalism mainly focuses on the Arab countries, whereas For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies Attacks Orientalism for only focusing on the central Arabic countries and leaving behind Turkey, Persia, India, and northern Africa. For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies focusses on the history of the academic idea of orientalism, thus the orientalism before Said defined it differently. As a result of Said defining orientalism differently, Irwin attacks him…show more content…
This is why Said it able to give the term a whole new meaning. Would the term have one distinct meaning and history, it would not have been possible to change the meaning of orientalism. However, chancing the meaning of orientalism caused for critics towards Said. Yet as long as the Orient is not one agreed location, as well as an image, and a history the subject of Orientalism will continue to be controversial and will continue to have different meanings, with each a different meaning to different people. As Lewis says “Scholarly criticism of Orientalist scholarship is a legitimate and indeed a necessary, inherent part of the process. Fortunately, it is going on all the time—not a criticism of orientalism, which would be meaningless, but a criticism of the research and results of individual scholars or schools of scholars” (118). By having critique on orientalism, the term orientalism becomes what it can become by the research of scholars. Thus, even so orientalism is a controversial subject, by being controversial it works to be a term that is

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