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Title: Orientalism by Edward W. Said ISBN: 0-394-74067-X Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 12 October, 1979 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.9 (41 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A masterpiece about the origins of "knowledge"!
Comment: Few books in the modern world have acquired the stature of Edward Said's "Orientalism". It has become the de facto authority on the Western perspective of the Middle Eastern and Oriental worlds. Using impeccable scholarship and irrefutable evidence from two centuries' worth of European writing about the East, Edward Said lays down an indisputable case about how Western so-called "objective" and "scientific" study of the East has been corrupted and is far from describing reality. "Orientalism"'s main achievement, however, spreads far beyond the arena of "Oriental Studies" or "Near Eastern Studies" as they are now called. This book demonstrates using an in-depth case study how an entire field of study can be constructed out of self-reinforcing fiction that tends to gather its own inertia and develop its own seemingly self-consistent world. "Orientalism" therefore is a strong warning not only to Orientalists but to all unsuspecting researchers in any subject (even science) who might, deliberately or not, end up constructing their own mythical world. "Orientalism" also analyses the intricate relationships between knowledge and power, demonstrating the fallacy of taking knowledge for granted without analyzing and understanding the power structure that brought this "knowledge" into being.
This is a highly recommended book. It's only weakness is that it can somewhat difficult reading, thanks to its author's genius and total mastery of the English language. I often had to underline difficult words and look them up in a dictionary, and read over some paragraphs again and again in order to grasp the complex ideas, so once I was done with the book my GRE score improved 100 points. Seriously, though, "Orientalism" is a very perceptive and methodical study of an important topic today: the relationship between East and West.
Rating: 4
Summary: Eye Opening
Comment: Simply put an amazing book. Said's point is not to accuse the "West", for which he is derided by one of Amazon's "spotlighted reviewers" here, but instead Said seeks to explain how the history that has been written about the "Middle East" is biased.
All history is written filtered through the perspective of a writer, so all stories from the past have a slant. Not only the distant past, but current events as they are reported are colored too by perspectives of the reporter too. This book explores how an identity of the "Middle East" were created by colonial powers; an identity which was not real for the people from the region.
This book was a ground breaking phenomena because it was the first of its kind to explore how images of the "Middle East" have been misinterpreted by the "Western scholars;" a grievance that is still echoed by people in the Middle East today.
Rating: 3
Summary: Some good ideas in a sea of redundancies
Comment: In spite of how interesting all references and quotes of Orientalists could be, discovering that it takes more than 300 pages to Edward Said to define Orientalism as a system of ideological fictions is a bit disappointing, after he repeated the same concept hundreds of times with different words. Well, that statement is true for almost all sciences, both social and technical, and surely for their development during XIX century. Once I have been warned by the author that Orientalism has been built above prejudices, and I have been given some significant examples of that, I would prefer not to go through a myriad of further instances to support the initial thesis. Besides, Orientalism's functional facet to Colonialism are widely mentioned, but poorly deepened. That would have required an interdisciplinary approach - cultural, political, historical, ethnological and, why not, scientific - whilst this book is mainly an academic report about textual analysis. Another interesting side, i.e. why Oriental studies are carried on mainly by Western people?, is explained in a few final pages, and in my opinion it would have deserved much more space. So, when Said admits in his 1994 Afterword (probably the worthiest chapter in the whole book) that he has no interest, or capacity, in showing true Orient or Islam, I think he achieves an excessive restriction of the subject "Middle East" (because in this essay "Orient" means that), limiting its suitability to a general audience (which I belong to). There are of course many appreciable hints, but the general style, with its obsessive repetitions, reminds me too much of the political prose common in the 70's, even if Said makes a visible effort to maintain a scholar objectivity. In summary, I did not dislike the book, but I probably lack the specific knowledge necessary to fully appreciate it.
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Title: Culture and Imperialism by Edward W. Said ISBN: 0679750541 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 31 May, 1994 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Covering Islam : How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World by Edward W. Said ISBN: 0679758909 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 11 March, 1997 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Out of Place : A Memoir by Edward W. Said ISBN: 0679730672 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 12 September, 2000 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Question of Palestine by Edward W. Said ISBN: 0679739882 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 07 April, 1992 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Power, Politics, and Culture by Edward W. Said ISBN: 1400030668 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 27 August, 2002 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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