orientalism

Etymology

From French orientalisme, from oriental (“eastern, Oriental”). In the sense “patronizing Western attitude” popularized by Edward Said's 1978 book Orientalism. Equivalent to Oriental + -ism.

orientalism means the tendency to represent eastern subjects, to assume stylistical characteristics original of the East, especially in 19th century Europe. Lexicurio rates it Rare gem — a strength score of 80 out of 100.

Why “orientalism” is a great word

ORIENTALISM — [Noun] A patronizing Western scholarly and artistic tradition of representing Middle Eastern, Asian, and North African societies as exotic, backward, and inferior, often to justify colonial or imperial domination. From French *orientalisme*, from *oriental* ("eastern, Oriental"), from Latin *orientalis* ("of the east"), from *oriens* ("rising sun, east"). The critical academic sense was popularized by Edward Said's 1978 book *Orientalism*. Unlike "exoticism," which implies a simpler fascination with the unfamiliar, or "area studies," which purports objective analysis, Orientalism is the apparatus that manufactures the "Orient" as a static, knowable foil to a dynamic, rational West. It is the harem fantasy in a nineteenth-century painting, the philologist's taxonomy proving a civilization's stagnation, and the colonial map dividing the world into zones of civilization and barbarism—a persistent grammar of seeing that does not describe a world, but creates one for conquest.

noun

The tendency to represent eastern subjects, to assume stylistical characteristics original of the East, especially in 19th century Europe.“Moreover, among the group that was associated with the short-lived Institut historique, of which Senancour was a member from 1834 to 1840, was Eugène Burnouf, the great orientalist, to whom much of the responsibility for the revived interest in orientalism of the mid-nineteenth century must be attributed.”
An Eastern word, expression, or custom.“The Scriptural style and the Scriptural language are not meant for one age, but for all ages. Its orientalisms will grow in the west; its archaisms will be found still young in the nineteenth century.”
A patronizing Western attitude towards Middle Eastern, Asian, and North African societies.“Unlike the Americans, the French and the British—less so the Germans, Russians, Spanish, Portuguese, Italians, and Swiss—have had a long tradition of what I shall be calling Orientalism, a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western experience.”