Orientalism and the “Others”

Part A
Orientalism and the “others”
This review examines the critique of Orientalism and how Orientalism affected the representation of various societies and its subjects during the Colonial encounters and in the historical present. In the case of my study, how Orientalism produced and are still producing the representations of minority non-Hans in China. This review explores Orientalism as a methodology of analysis that produced a certain biased views and representations of the Others, be they former colonial subjects, indigenous populations to contemporary immigrants, and so on, including, in the case of China, minority populations. In other words, Orientalism as an epistemology of power held by dominant authorities that shaped people’s identities and their thoughts.
To begin the review of the critique of Orientalism, I will start with Edward Said. His book Orientalism (1978) is a seminal text that opens up a critique of colonial imperial discourses that produced and reproduced a set of bifurcated East-West relations in the field of culture, art, economy, as well as civilization. In short, as an elaborate system, Orientalism contains thoughts and practices that produced and reproduced an inferiority complex among the wide varieties of “Others”. As a discourse, Orientalism affected not only the running of colonial administration but also produced an ethnocentric bias in academia that included anthropology, religious studies, linguistics, comparative literature, history, geography, political science, and area studies of peoples and cultures in the non-Western world. According to Said, Orientalism is not only about the power to represent, it is also about “a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philogical text” (Said 1978:12). As Said puts it, Orientalism “expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary,

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