International Encyclopedia of Communication Online

Extract

The emergence of postcolonial theory as an academic tradition, particularly in the United States, can be traced to the late 1970s with the publication of Edward Said's book Orientalism (1978). According to Said, Orientalism is a powerful body of knowledge – power/knowledge in Michel Foucault's sense (→  Structuralism ) – produced by texts and institutional practices of western colonialism beginning with Napoleon's conquest of Egypt in 1798. Said finds three key elements in Orientalism: first, the power/knowledge of colonial institutions and texts to understand, control, and manipulate the “Orient” (or the east); second, the representation of “Oriental” societies as an unchanging cultural essence; and third, the fabrication of the “Orient” as an ahistorical space waiting to be transformed by historical progress and social development. Orientalism, according to Said, was a European enterprise from the beginning. Its producers were European scholars and writers; its consumers were European students and readers; the non-European subjects of Orientalism figured only as inert objects. Since the “western self” of the European Orientalist made sense only in opposition to the “Oriental other,” the traces of each in the other were systematically ignored or concealed. By positing that the east–west binary opposition predated colonialism, Orientalism also made Europe's colonial conquests ... log in or subscribe to read full text