Edward Said's Orientalism

redpill me on it, Veeky Forums

I don't know what you mean by redpill but it's a good book and you should read it regardless of whatever preconceived notions you have for it.

>western images of the east are racist

There. The whole book can be summed up in one sentence. I saved you time. You're welcome.

It's probably the other text next to Judith Butler's Gender Trouble that has informed today's tumblr identity politics.

There are a lot of reasons it's actually a very faulty argument and it basically just stirred up more shit and resentment and makes the media landscape so obnoxious all day.

>western images of the east are racist

Yeah, that's basically it. "The west sees the Middle East / East as "exotic" and "other" which is racist, lets complain endlessly".

Like, as if obviously distant cultures will not have inaccurate and shorthand and exoticized impressions of other cultures. Nobody has access to the thing-in-itself of anything, so we are working with impressions. It goes all directions.

But the book wants the "West" to be seen as solely guilty of this like we're inherently bad and therefore one must complain and nitpick endlessly.

>>western images of the east are racist

no, that's not it, did you guys even read the fucking thing? the point was that the "east" is a social construct, artificial division, is egypt really that different from greece? etc.

unfortunately after the last election this board, and site in general, has become just too filled with alt-right pseuds, kys thx

The "West" has a tendency to portray the "East" as the Anti-West, but this is innacurate because the East is really more complex than that. I didn't really read the whole thing

It was pretty damned groundbreaking for it's time. It explored the portrayal of Oriental cultures within Western culture as being inherently Othered as a phenomenon that enabled conflict. It helped to establish a basically understood tenet of modern international relations as a case study, which is that cultures are more likely to make war against one another based not upon inherent similarity within those cultures but perceived similarity.

Americans and Brits aren't really alike culturally, for instance, but perceive themselves to be alike culturally. The likelihood of a war between the two is low due to that perception. However the perception of Oriental cultures is that of being alien and is perpetually kept as alien, which allows the perpetuation of warfare. Naturally this cuts both ways in the form of Occidentalism, but when you talk about "redpilling" in a /pol/ sense you're talking about a narrative about "muh anti-white racism", which is more or less an object lesson on the topic.

It was groundbreaking for it's time.

>is egypt really that different from greece?
Not to mention that Egypt, India, and Japan are all thrown in the same category

>redpill me on it, Veeky Forums
the redpill is that the west is superior and the only hope for a lasting civilization
the east is inferior and weird, interesting only in a "freak show" sort of way, but best ignored altogether because of its corrupting effects
in that sense, the east is also doomed to consume itself. it can only survive by spreading like a virus and living off of the wealth of the west. and only then to kill us off eventually too. that is why we must exterminate the east in its entirety: 1) it is destined to destroy itself anyway and 2) it will destroy us first if we don't stop it

>Americans and Brits aren't really alike culturally, for instance, but perceive themselves to be alike culturally.
They're very much alike.
>practical
>protestant
>English speaking
>capitalist
etc
>However the perception of Oriental cultures is that of being alien and is perpetually kept as alien, which allows the perpetuation of warfare
Pure nonsense. There has been as much bloodshed in Europe as in the orient.
"Othered"
jesus christ

>They're very much alike

You ignorant fuck. I'm an American who was born in the UK to American parents, raised there, then brought back to the US. The surface level shit that you are talking about just demonstrates how much you don't fucking know about the cultural gap there. The British live under a literal class system and they die where they are fucking born, in America when you say class people think it means how much money you make. I've seen the upper class refuse to even speak to someone of middle class or lower class origins because they consider that person to have been born so far beneath them as to be unworthy of being spoken to even though the individual in question had lost much of his money in an investment gone bad back in the 80's.

People like you who think that they know shit because they can spout off some surface level facts frustrate the Hell out of me because you don't even accept it when you are corrected by someone who does know.

I want /pol/ to get the fuck out of here with it's nonsense.

The orient is way more diverse than the west. The term orient/asian has basically been used by colonial countries to refer to all non whites east of Europe. East/Southeast Asians, Middle Easterns and South Asians are as different from each other as a Norwegian and a Congolese.

The things this book says are very obvious, although not wrong basically.