Orientalism’s contribution to world history and middle eastern history 35 years later

Abstract

Since the nineteenth century, the dominant metanarrative in the university has been the one constructed from Hegel’s notion of the rise of the West, complete with a stagnant Orient and a people without history. Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) argued that one major part of this triad, namely that of the Orient, lacked credibility, that it would not exist as a scientific concept apart from the context of colonialism and imperialism. While neither fully digested much less accepted by most of his readers, his argument has nonetheless had a continuing impact throughout the academy.