This document discusses the topic of Orientalism. It defines Orientalism as the study of Eastern countries, especially from the perspective of Western scholars. It notes that the Orient was largely a European invention that portrayed Eastern lands and people in romanticized and exaggerated terms. The document then examines some of the methodological problems with Orientalism, including the political and material influences on its perspectives as well as the relationship between academic and imaginative meanings of the Orient. It also differentiates between the terms Orient and Occident. In concluding, the document states that Orientalism was not just a body of texts but also a system of knowledge production and governance over Eastern regions.

1. Topic : Orientalism.
• Name : Makwana Ankita m.
• Paper No :12
• Roll No :1
• Year :2013-14
• Semester : 3
• Guidance : by Department of English

2. What is Orientalism.
• The term ‘Orient’ is derives from the Latin
word ‘oriens’meaning ‘East’.
• The country of the east especially East Asia.
• Study of orient means a study of orients.
• The orient almost a European invention, had
been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic
beings, haunting memories and landscapes,
remarkable experience.

3. Map of The Oriental People

4. The methodological problems.
problems
Historically
and
materially.
Academic
Imaginative
meaning

5. Historically and materially.
• The orient is not just mind but also material.
• Materiality of governance, materiality of
Education…..
• According to Foucault
• “It is a discourse”.
• Because the orient ideas is not free.
• The orient politically, sociologically militarily,
ideologically, during the post-Enlightenment
period.

6. Academic.
• The interchange between the academic and the
more or less imaginative meaning of
orientalism is a constant one, and since the late
eighteenth century there has been a
considerable, quite disciplined perhaps even
regulated traffic between two.

7. Different between orient and
occident.
• Orient derives from the Latin word Oriens
and it means ‘East’.
• The opposite term ‘Occident’ derives from
the Latin word ‘Occidens’, meaning ‘West’.
• It is a literary and formal word for Western.
• The relationship between Orient and
Occident and is a relationship of power and
domination.

8. Reasonable Qualification.
• In the first place it would be wrong to
conclude that the orient was essentially an
idea or a creation with no corresponding
reality.
• A second qualification is that ideas, culture,
and histories cannot seriously be understood
or studied without their force, or more
precisely their configuration of power, also
being studied.

9. • The structure of orient is nothing more than a
structure of lies or the myths which, were the
truth about them to be told , would simply blow
away.
• Orientalism as a system of knowledge about
Orient, an accepted grid for filtering through the
Orient into Western consciousness, just as that
same investment multiplied indeed made truly
productive the statements profiling out from
Orientalism into the general culture.

10. Three aspects of contemporary
reality.
The distinction between pure and
political
The methodological
question
The personal
dimension.

11. The distinction between pure and
political
• It is a very easy to argue that knowledge about Shakespeare or
Wordsworth is not political whereas knowledge about
contemporary China or the Soviet Union is.
• West is that it be nonpolitical, that scholarly, academic,
impartial.
• The Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field
that is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or
institutions ; nor it is a representative and expressive of some
nefarious “western” imperialist plot to hold down the
“Oriental” world.

12. The methodological question
• The Anglo-French-American experience of the
Arab and Islam , which for almost a thousand
years together stood for the Orient.
• Immediately upon doing that a , large part of the
Orient seemed to have been eliminated-India,
Japan, china and other sections of the Far East-not
because these regions were not important
but because one could discuss Europe's
experience of the Near Orient, or of Islam, apart
from its experience of the Far Orient

13. The personal dimension.
• In the Prison Notebooks Gramsci says: “The
starting point of critical elaboration is the
consciousness of what one really is, and is
Knowing thyself as a product of the historical
process to date…..”
• Much of the personal investment in this study
derives from my awareness of being an
“Oriental "as a child growing up in two British
colonies.

14. Conclusion
• In short Orientalism is not just large collection
of texts . It is not political subject matter. The
corporate institution for dealing with the
Orient.. Dealing it by making statement about
it, authority view of it, by teaching it, ruling
over it.