From Due East to True North: Orientalism and Orientation

Abstract

Since its publication in the late 1970s, Edward Said’s masterful study Orientalism has been the foundation of virtually every effort to characterize literary descriptions of the Near and Middle East. Said argues that the Orient and the Occident mirror one another, locked in a mutually self- sustaining fiction. Yet, as Aijaz Ahmad has pointed out, Said’s account of the origins of the idea of the Orient is, at best, plural; at worst, contradictory. The Orient is simultaneously both a product of Western European colonization of Egypt and the Levant during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and a concept that has existed almost since the beginning of time. 2 Said devotes litde space to accounts of the Orient found in medieval texts, a peculiar omission in view of the fact that Western efforts to conquer Jerusalem during the Crusades can be seen as an early manifestation of modern efforts to colonize the Orient. 4 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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