Summary of "On Orientalism" by Edward Said Essay Example

Summary of "On Orientalism" by Edward Said One of the most important themes of the movie “On Orientalism” by Edward Said's is the approach and the concepts of the area of people that has needed world attention for so long. Edward Said’s study of “Orientalism” includes the Middle East, the Near East, and the Far East, this area of the world starts conflict sooner than any part of the world and it has been this way for almost 2000 years. This whole area of the world is grouped into one category called Oriental. Most of the movie’s approach is to study Orientalism through language. In the early days of the eighteenth century, one of the main approaches was to learn different languages and translate the native words into Western languages. They thought that this was the way to study the culture, but problems started to arise. There are different language structures and words that are different between languages, also there are multiword units like idioms that make it hard to understand the actually meaning behind the words. People from the west are not sure how they should be representing the culture, or what rules should be using to describe the Oriental culture. In the movie Said defines the term Orientalism and describing the origins of this confusion between Eastern from Western writers and the colonizers from the 18th Century to the present day. As Edward Said’s explains, an American Palestinian cultural theorist has written upon a diverse range of Western literature and culture. In another words he defines somebody who comes from the West, in the role of the other. By looking at the history of the term "Orientalism" as defined by western philosophers, Said argues that the West continue to define Arab cultures as a kind of eroticized other. Said goes on to discuss how such treatment of the Arab world by Western scholars is deeply imbedded in power structures and continues to degrade the Arab world; which also reduces Arab