Orientalism Post

Edward Said defines Orientalism in multiple ways. Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient is an Orientalist, and what they do is Orientalism. Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between "the Orient" and (most of the time) "the Occident" (the East and the West). Orientalism is a Western style for dominating, reconstructing, and having authority over the Orient. His theory makes it easy to see European/Western culture as vampiric (the major component of European culture, the idea of European identity as superior in comparison with all others, is cultural hegemony at work, sucking the validity and life from other cultures, in this case resulting in Orientalism).

Looking at America's cultural relationship to the world, I would say that we do have an Orientalist mindset. I am basing this assumption partly on the rhetoric that is constantly thrown around when people discuss America, which is mostly along the lines of how beautiful a nation we have, or how lucky we are to live in America and not somewhere else. It's this kind of thought, this assumption that America is as good as it gets, that sort of points to a superiority complex in American culture. The prevailing thought that nothing about America can be improved, or that we are far superior to even other Western cultures shows this. We think of other cultures in whatever ways we want, because the only one that really matters is the superior one: America's.