Status Updates From Orientalism: Western Concep...

I haven’t gotten far into this book at all, but shortly after I began to read it, the attack on Iran by the US and Israel happened. It’s sad to say how orientalism hasn’t changed at all, even decades after this book’s inception. We need books like this now more than ever.

really its all a desperate attempt to pacify my ever racing mind from its own winds… definitely feel like jm learning ALOT from this book just structurally. he’s such a sharp writer and makes his points in a very economic manner

“If this stimulates a new kind of dealing with the Orient, indeed it it eliminates the "Orient" and "Occident" altogether, then we shall have advanced a little in the process of what Raymond Williams has called the "unlearning" of "the inherent dominative mode.”

reinforced stereotypes, media

-> callback Walter Benjamin?

Gramsci mentioned! (again)

Overview

“there has never been […] an ‘idea’ of the Orient.”

“as early as Aeschylus's play The Persians the Orient is transformed from a very far distant and often threatening Otherness into figures that are relatively familiar”

strategic location, strategic formation

German oriental scholarship

“[…] Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field […] [but] a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but also of a whole series of ‘interests’ […]”