Orientalism Is...

According to Edward Said, Orientalism is a political view that encourages the binary between the familiar West and the unfamiliar East. People from the East, or "Orientals," are stereotypically sly, mystical, and untrustworthy. These "Orientals" are also completely contrived by the West- they are characters created to make the East seem more other, to make western cultures feel knowledgeable about the East, and to strengthen the binary between them. Basically, the West created Orientalism to make it seem like they knew their stuff when it came to non-western countries, when, in fact, they did not.

So, is Orientalism still present in modern western cultures? Yes! It's alive, well, and presenting itself in new and terrible ways. For example, America has created a binary between itself and the Middle East specifically. There are offensive stereotypes about Middle Eastern people (they're terrorists, everyone wears a turban and rides a camel and has twenty wives) that Americans use to pretend to understand what their culture is like while also maintaining dominance in the binary by imposing those negative stereotypes. Islamophobia seems to be the modern Orientalism.