Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism’ is among the most important books of the previous decade. It gave rise to a new kind of discourse around colonialism. Said’s groundbreaking work explores how the West has represented the Middle East for ages. Said begins by talking about various myths that were attached to the Orients or the people living in the Middle East, whatever knowledge the West has acquired about them is from age-old literature filled in Western libraries and they continue to define the West’s perspective on Occidental people considering them as exotic or savage people.
Said himself was a Palestinian Arab living in America given that he had a first-person point of view of Orientalists. In his work Said targeted many famous Western writers and historians upon their biased portrayal of Orientals. The West created Occident and Orient binaries for ‘Self’ and the ‘Other’.
This othering helped Westerners in their imperial motives through which they sought to ‘Civilise’ the world.
Since the publication of Said’s work, several post-colonial and anti-imperialism debates took shape that aimed to undo the Western agenda, and undercurrents of those beliefs could be felt to date.
India’s External Affairs Minister Mr. S Jaishankar in an interview highlighted Europe’s tendency to consider its problem as the world’s problem and not vice versa. We see that even after several technological advances, the West has failed to understand the culture of other parts of the world. The binaries created centuries back still operate in the way Western media portrays the world. This is one of the primary reasons why racism continues to be one of the biggest issues in Western countries.
It’s time that people and the media of the West invest their time and energy in understanding the culture of other countries rather than believing in age-old pictures drawn and presented to them.