The change of the European societies from feudal to industrial in the 19th
century is the driving force behind colonizing Asia, Middle East and Africa and the
imperial policy of looking for raw materials, opportunities and new markets. The
European colonial campaign (for more information on colonialism, see, Loomba, 1998;
Sardar, 1999; Césaire, 2001; Macqueen, 2007; and Reinhard, 2011) of expansion has
been launched in the guise of a civilizing mission, science, progress and developing projects
in underdeveloped nations (for more information on colonialism and civilizing mission in
British India, see, Fischer-Tiné and Mann, 2004).Orientalism1 as an institution has fed the
colonial campaign by fabricated and falsified information about the Orient and its inhabitants
in order to justify the civilizing mission of the West to redeem and save the Orient.
Orientalism can be defined as a western style for “dominating, restructuring and having
authority over the Orient” (Said, 1978, p. 3). It is a western invention which constructs
the East as the ‘Other’ (for more information on the representation of the ‘Other’, see,
Hall, 1997; and Childs and Fowler, 2006). For example, the Self is represented by the
Orientalists as “the familiar Europe, the West, ‘us’ and the Other is constructed as strange,
the Orient, the east, ‘them’” (Said, 1978, p. 43).Within this context, Loomba sees the Self
as “the colonialist and the Other is the colonized” (Loomba, 1998, p. 144). In other words,
the ‘Other’ is everything that lies outside of the Self. One may say that the outcome of
Orientalism is the building of a binary opposition between Occident and Orient. The
Orient is constructed as “everything that the West is not, exotic, alien, dangerous, unreliable,
to be tamed, exhibited, a threat to the West” (Moosavinia et al., 2011, p. 105).
|
