- Said's "Orientalism" is a reflection on the formative power of scholarship and imaginative literature. More specifically, the book explores various representations of the Orient put forth by the Franco-British empires of the 18th and 19th centuries. The concept of "the Orient," Said argues, is in essence a construct of these academic and literary "discourses" (a notion he borrows from Foucault), an invention, as it were, of the Oriental "re-presented" through Eurocentric eyes.
- For Said, the split between East and West is inextricably mediated by relations of power governed by larger structures of discourse. Accordingly, the Orient is only "there" as an object of Western knowledge on account of the discourses that make it accessible as such.
- "Orientalism," Said writes, "is, above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political (as with a colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning sciences like comparative linguistics or anatomy, or any of the modern policy sciences), power cultural (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values), power moral (as with ideas about what "we" do and what "they" cannot do or understand as "we" do)." Discourse, in short, establishes the framework of relations through which power defines a certain perception (or representation) of reality. This explains Said's seemingly awkward use of "power" here as both adjective and noun, a grammatical duplicity that stresses the determinative force of the word.
- To illuminate the relevant power relations mediating the "us" and "them" of Orientalist discourse, Said examines a number French and British novels, travel books, letters, manuscripts, documents, and various other textual remnants of material cultural. Authorial self-positioning, as Said shows, implicitly reflects the Orientalist stereotypes common to the imperial mindset.
- Said's work has outlined a framework for unveiling many of the ideological assumptions built in to imperialist discourses about "the third" world, and has challenged a generation of scholars to complicate the lazy assumption that scholarship simply begins from a value-free platform.
- Said's sharp West/East dichotomy has, of course, encountered criticism. Homi Bhabha, for instance, has put forth the notion of "hybridity" as a more fluid alternative to the West/East, colonizer/colonized oppositions formulated by Said's interpretation of Orientalism.
- In an age of globalization, neo-colonial technological expansion, and corporate profit-mongering in "developing" countries, the notion of Orientalism remains a valuable touchstone for gauging East/West relations in the 21st century.
