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Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Chapters: Orientalism. Source: Wikipedia. Free updates online. Not illustrated. Excerpt: Orientalism is the 1978 book by Edward Said that has been highly influential in postcolonial studies. In the book, Said writes that "Orientalism" is a constellation of false assumptions underlying Western attitudes toward the Middle East. This body of scholarship is marked by a "subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture." He argued that a long tradition of romanticized images of Asia and the Middle East in Western culture had served as an implicit justification for European and the American colonial and imperial ambitions. Just as fiercely, he denounced the practice of Arab elites who internalized the US and British orientalists' ideas of Arabic culture. So far as the United States seems to be concerned, it is only a slight overstatement to say that Muslims and Arabs are essentially seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists. Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab-Moslem life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Arab world. What we have instead is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world presented in such a way as to make that world vulnerable to military aggression. Said summarised his work in these terms: "My contention is that Orientalism is fundamentally a political doctrine willed over the Orient because the Orient was weaker than the West, which elided the Orients difference with its weakness. . . . As a cultural apparatus Orientalism is all aggression, activity, judgment, will-to-truth, and knowledge" (Orientalism, p. 204). Said also wrote: "My whole point about this system is not that it is a misrepresentation of some Oriental essence in ...http://booksllc.net/?l=en