WORLD HISTORY

Detailed explanation-1: -Edward Said, a Palestinian academic working in the mid-late 20th century, wrote Orientalism (1978) in order to underline the essentialising narratives of Western scholars which he saw as dominating the East throughout history.

Detailed explanation-2: -Edward Said substantially invented both the term Orientalism and the field of postcolonial studies. According to Said, Orientalism is a “created body of theory and practice” which constructs images of the Orient or the East directed toward those in the West.

Detailed explanation-3: -4.1. One of Edward Said’s central ideas in Orientalism is that knowledge about the East is generated not through actual facts, but through imagined constructs. These constructs imagined “Eastern” societies as fundamentally similar and sharing the characteristics that are not possessed by “Western” societies.