Orientalism and Edward Said

Bringing together the works of Said, Loti, and many other important literary sources, I will look critically at the historical interaction between the West and ˜The Rest' and analyze key subtopics including but not limited to; geopolitical issues, bi-orientalism, how the views of the Orient have changed throughout time, multifaceted issues within The Orient, and why the West is so interested in The Orient. .
             Throughout his novel, Said identifies several dangerous assumptions made by the West about the Orient that had the chance, given the influence of the West over the past 2000 years, to materialize and contribute to the manifestation of complex issues within the Orient. Educationally, the domination has been so complete for such an amount of time that Said goes as far as to say that even supposed outwardly objective Western texts and literary works on the East have been long-permeated with bias that it was unrecognizable by Western scholars. Thus, claiming that aside from the often-discussed political supremacy of the West, Western scholars have also successfully employed the interpretation of the Orient's languages, history and culture for themselves by writing The Orient's past and constructing its modern identities from a perspective that views Europe as the norm and The Orient as the socially-constructed, "exotic.".
             Moreover, Said explores how the assumptions put forth by these Western scholars have been constructed in opposition to how the West portrays themselves as the rational, as the open-minded, as the tolerant, and thus defines this projected image of ˜The Orient' as something we are not under the constituted definition of what ˜the other' is. What is so perilous about assumptions, when it is just this, assumptions? The precarious outcomes of the assumptions by the influential West has resulted in the misrepresentation of what the truth can be, and has impacted both ideologies and the interrelationships between these parts of the world.