Imperialism with Edward Said

    Edward Said's concept of Orientalism and the ideas from it are very interesting and different from other writings. While other writers such as Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling are seen as racist white men who unknowingly disprove the identity of the Asian area, Said embraces the western writing styles and doesn't cover his blind spot with his other writings. The way that the opinion of orientalism arises through literature and art along with journalism creates an interesting idea that to the imperialists entering these new lands think of themselves as the greatest and most important settlers while the rest of the population is peasant level. Said traces around the two possibly racist writers and sharpens their ideas from a dull racist writing of a savage area to a creative style for the reading needed. The idea itself has a strong backing to it along with support from the reviewer, who believes that Said should not be placed in the discarded area of racist literature. Said is correct in saying that the structure of the literature is at fault for this racist interpretation and not the writer at hand.
   In a similar way, the writings of Joel Chandler Harris and his Brer Rabbit stories were seen as being extremely racist after they were written in the nadir of black life during the 1890's. Being my Junior Theme topic, I read through multiple reviews of Harris' work about how he created the black characters to be scary and stupid while giving the white children perfect grammar in dialogue. Living in Georgia his whole life, the original writings of Brer Rabbit were in extreme phonetic language and almost impossible to read today. With seemingly racist characters as old Uncle Remus and the Tar Baby, people disowned Joel Chandler Harris' stories and modified them to be what they thought was appropriate for children. But growing up in poverty and spending most of his days talking to recently freed slaves, Harris' objective writings and folklore style like how he was told the stories made them inherently racist. This relates to Said's writings in that the style of the writing makes him seem to be racist with Orientalism, yet it is just the western structure of writing he adopts.