Introduction to Visual Cultures and Narrative Form Essay

Introduction to Visual Cultures and Narrative Form - Essay Example Said (1979, pp. 1-3) in his criticism of orientalism redefined it as the constellation of false assumptions that underlay the attitude of the Western nations towards the Middle East. The Western nations, America and European thereby used orientalism culture and romanticized images of Middle East and Asia as a justification of their colonial and imperial ambitions. Said fiercely denounces this culture and equally criticizes the Arab elites whose practices revolved around internalized ideas from British and American orientalists. The danger linked to the orientalism culture by the West is that some East can treat it as truth thereby affecting relations and ideologies. However, Said (1979) emphasizes that it is hard to label half of the continent as orient and manage to generalize that what applies to Egyptians equally applies to Chinese. Orientalism in this paper supports Edward Said’s critical theory approach to international relations theory where the West forms a one-way imag e of the Oriental. The discussion focuses on definition of terms, orientalism and Occident, and early orientalism and contemporary orientalism. The orient according to Said (1978, p. 4) refers to a representations’ system enclosed by forces from politics that introduced the orient into western consciousness, Western learning, and Western Empire. The system of representation results from the condensation of diverse attributes into a single image not from facts but from perceptions that are regarded as a standard of comparison (Hall, 1992). In addition, orientatlism offers a criterion for evaluation that other world societies rank negatively or positively thereby functioning as an ideology. For the West, the orient is constructed relative to the West and has largely assisted in the definition of Europe or the West since it is views as the contrasting image, experience, idea, and personality (Said, 1979, pp. 1-2). The