The East in The Mirror of The West: Oriental Influences in English Literature

With the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism in 1978 the postcolonial world has looked at the European discipline of Orientalism with a great deal of skepticism if not open hostility. Said had declared famously in the opening chapter of this book that Orientalism was a "Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient". What Said has also pointed out here is that the discipline of Orientalism has stereotyped if not actually misrepresented the Orient. For the Europeans the study of the Orient also became a means of self-definition. Europe or the Occident was what the Orient was not. So for instance if the Orient was spiritual, the Occident was rational. That the age of Oriental studies coincided with the age of European colonization of the East is not coincidental. Michel Foucault has used the term 'Power/Knowledge' to indicate the connection of Power to Knowledge', so the amassing of Eastern knowledge by the West, served the interests of colonization more directly than it was imagined before the publication of Said's canonical text.

However, Said's critique of the West in Orientalism has been challenged by scholars around the world who have either engaged in Said-bashing or else more constructively value added to his thesis on Orientalism. For instance, a comprehensive defense of the West has been put forward in Ibn Warraq's book, Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism'. Daniel Martin Varisco in Reading Orien talism: The Said and the Unsaid has provided details regarding the several debates on Eastern and Western scholarships in Said's text. Aijaz Ahmad, the Indian Marxist literary critic, has in his In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures strongly questioned the liberalist humanist tradition in which Said has criticized Orientalism and linked it to the exploitation of the East by the West. This exploitation in the colonial period was of an economic nature and Ahmad has felt that this has not been much tackled by Said.

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