The title of a germinal book by Edward Said. Influenced by Michel Foucault, Said saw orientalism as a multi-faceted entity:

  • an academic discipline;
  • "a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction" between the occident and the orient; and
  • "a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient".

In Said's view, occident and orient are constructed in mutual and perfect opposition: the west white, civilized, rational, productive, masculine; the east dark, primitive, irrational, lazy, feminine. The dichotomy justifies colonization and defines its disciplinary goals - to "civilize" the orient - but also sets its limits: the colonized can never be truly "occidentalized", both by definition and because of orientalism's structural importance for western self-definition.

Yet Said reproduces the very knowledge structure he challenges by focusing on texts by western writers, occluding both non-western texts and the "lives, histories, and customs" of the inhabitants of the orient and the "brute reality" of their existence, which he can only "acknowledge...tacitly" (5). The end result is that they remain, once again, invisible, spoken about, but not speaking.

Homi Bhabha, in one reading of orientalist texts, draws attention to moments when colonial authority falters and wavers under questioning by the colonized. He names this subversive querying hybridity, "the strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal"; its effect is to "turn the gaze of the discriminated back upon the eye of power". Said's orientals are silent, but Bhabha's "resist" through "sharp" and "wily" "discursive disturbance": they challenge, seek clarification, disbelieve, and reinterpret, and thus subtly change the terms of discourse. They seditiously mimic western discourse as "a form of defensive warfare", responding with a "sly civility" which appears politely quiescent to, yet parries, colonial discipline. Their knowledges, "disavowed" by the colonizers, "return" in colonial texts "to make the presence of authority uncertain". A true Foucaultian play of power and resistance is evidenced in Bhabha's innovative reading.


The quotations from Edward Said are taken from Orientalism. Those from Homi Bhabha are from his article "Signs Taken for Wonders", found in a number of places, including his book The Location of Culture.