Vasunia, Phiroze; (2024) Edward Said's Orientalism: A Reappraisal. In: Blouin, Katherine and Akrigg, Ben, (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Classics, Colonialism, and Postcolonial Theory. (pp. 43-61). Routledge: London, UK. (In press).

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Abstract

Edward Said’s Orientalism came out in 1978—that is, more than forty years ago—and has been the beneficiary of all kinds of criticism and debate in a range of disciplines; it is among the most discussed and perhaps also the most criticized works of English-language scholarship from the second half of the twentieth century. As with the scholarship on Aeschylus, there are layers and layers of history, thought, and practice behind the modern discourses of Orientalism, or colonialism, or nationalism, or race. Racial capitalism and settler colonialism are, despite years of analysis and critique, still being worked through and throw up new problems and challenges every day. The ‘Black Lives Matter’ and ‘Decolonize the Curriculum’ movements, at least in the UK and the USA, have made the case for a powerful re-assessment of contemporary attitudes to race and colonialism, but our education in these issues needs a prolonged and subtle development before we can arrive at a deep reckoning of the problems. Said did not, perhaps, anticipate the rise of these movements in the particular forms they took, but his books were already contributing to their intellectual grounding. Readers of Orientalism know that these problems have been with us for centuries and that a historically informed approach to them will bring us closer to a place of understanding.

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