"I come from a land, from a far away place" The Barbaric Notion of Orientalism

When I was a kid, my sisters and I liked to play dress up.  We had a bin that was full of costumes in every size shape and color. The more we could shed our everyday appearances the further we would be able to dive into our own imaginations. Wigs, jewelry, and capes awaited our transformation.   

 I loved to be anything from what I considered far away lands, specifically the mystical and fantastical land of Agrabah. It doesn't come as a surprise then that my favorite person to transform into was Disney's Aladdin.  I had a costume for when Aladdin was an ordinary "street rat" and one for when Aladdin was "Prince Ali Bhabha."  I even had the cassette tape for the Aladdin soundtrack.  My sisters and I would dress up and put on a show pretending that we were the citizens in a land far away, pretending to be people we had no understanding of.  We donned ourselves with baubles, , capes, and of course the most important part of our costumes were our headdresses.   The only way I was truly Aladdin, in the identity of "Prince Ali Bhabha was when I wrapped a towel around my head which I would then pin together with a feather and jewel.  I even went as far as penciling a fake thin lined beard and mustache.

Fascination, wonder, and exoticism were concepts I associated with becoming something other then myself.  I loved it, and the Eastern world fascinated me in a way that was indescribable.  One thing is clear that my fascination was of a unnatural type, a fascination that was instilled on me by outside forces. 

It is terrifying now to look back and realize that I was participating in a legacy that was far beyond my own understanding. It was a construction so powerful that it invaded the inner most recesses of my young naive mind, and planted the seeds of racism and prejudice.

What I experienced as a small child then was what Mr. Edward Said would call the concept of Orientalism.

It would take several, perhaps even a hundred posts to even do Said justice.  So for this post I would like to clarify Said's definition of Orientalism.  After all, we post-colonial scholars/critics owe Said for the work he contributed to our field of study. 

The first and most important part of Said's definition of Orientalism is that it "is not an inert fact of nature. It is not merely there, just as the Occident itself is not just there either....There for as much as the West itself, the Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West. The two geographical entities thus support and to an extent reflect each other" (Postcolonialisms 74).  Here Said is saying that the concept, or notion of Orientalism, is unnatural, something that has been created by humans, specifically European and American.
Second, Said is distinguishing that in order for Orientalism to exist, in must do so in the form of a binary, but not an ordinary binary.  Instead like he says, they "support and reflect" each other.  A gaze that works both ways, a gaze which reflects itself, a mirror of sorts.  What Said is hinting at, but doesn't actually come out and say it in this passage is the theoretical notion of the "colonial gaze."  One exists because the other acknowledges the other, and because of that acknowledgment they exist here as well as there.  Thus, Orientalism is a product of Europe's "colonial gaze."  The colonial gaze thrives on this distinction, this creation of other, however Orientalism has become a term that has come to embody all of the East, creating not a mass group of countries, but a mass group of people.   People who are very much different in their many cultures and countries, but because of the consuming concept of Orientalism are made to represent the standard concept of the other.

Said says that the reason Orientalism survives is because it's a system that has penetrated both the cultures East/West. Through repetitive and consistent reproduction it is able to survive from it's historical vantage point to its present historical point.  America has become the new Europe, and the Orient is still viewed through this dominant binary.   Orientalism is a practice, instilled through academia, science and art, and because of this they are part of a larger system of domination (Postcolonialisms 75).  Therefore as Said says "Orientalism is not an airy European fantasy about the Orient, but a created body of theory, and practice in which, for many generations, there has been considerable material investment" (Postcolonialisms 75).

Through materialism Orientalism thrives, my childhood experiences assert this notion that Said categorizes as the root of Orientalism.  Because I saw the certain physical and Otherized representations of  a people I had no association with I created a fake and distorted fantasy in my childhood head.  Little did I know that these representations were the repercussions of a powerful binary.


I have only touched the surface of Said's research, but I hope I have provided a clear understanding of his definition of Orientalism.


For the time being, here's two video for you to muse over, and some questions to think about.

                           What do the lyrics of this song suggest?  What types of words are used?
*Disney changed the theatrical lyrics, these are the original lyrics.  Why do you think they changed them?

How many different Orientalisms are presented? What shapes and sizes? How do they dress? How do they act? What does this say about the Westernized view of the East?  What effect does this have on people who have no recollection of what the Orient is?  How does it effect our conscious?