Construction of 'the East': Orientalism

‘’Where its flat and immense and the heat is intense—it’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home!"

A film most of us have seen, Disney’s Aladdin (1992). Yet behind the catchy tunes and animation lies a pattern of storytelling- one that portrays the East according to Western imagination. In this world, the East is represented as irrational, seductive, and uncivilized, a place of magicians, flying carpets, and fantasies. This depiction of the east from Western perspective belongs to Orientalism. But what is Orientalism? And how has it shaped the way the Orient has been seen through texts?

Before being associated with representation of the east by western societies, Orientalism was an academic discipline that involved anyone who studies the Orient. However, particularly in Edward Said’s 1978 landmark book Orientalism, the term has profoundly changed to be discussed as a claim of the West for dominance over the eastern societies. Said defined Orientalism as a set of Western discourses of power through which the West constructed an image of the East (1978).The construction of these images, therefore, is not necessarily about innocent acts but rather about creating binaries of difference, such as defining the East as non-western, developing a sharp dichotomy between the groups. Through paintings and films, it usually constructs a different reality, rather than the actual truth, representing the East as irrational, exotic, mystic, and inferior to the West.

   Jean-Léon Gérôme -The Snake Charmer

French painter, Jean-Léon Gérôme is known for his classic examples of Orientalist art such as 1879 The Snake Charmer. In the painting, there is a young nude boy, surrounded by men who watch him perform, holding a snake. The background with blue mosaic tiles seems to resemble Islamic geometric patterns. Also, the choice of colour in this painting is dominated by blue and brown and the light emphasizes the walls, the boy and the snake. Symbols like nudity, snake and colour palette suggests a specific knowledge that changes our understanding of Eastern people. Furthermore, the painting uses titillating patterns that involves European fantasies about the Orient, portraying it as morally eroded.

David Lean-Lawrence of Arabia

The great drama of Lawrence's work is that it symbolizes the struggle, first, to stimulate the Orient (lifeless, timeless, forceless) into movement; second, to impose upon that movement an essentially Western shape; third, to contain the new and aroused Orient in a personal vision, whose retrospective mode includes a powerful sense of failure and betrayal.(Said E., 1978)

 Based on T.E Lawrence’s autobiographic work Seven Pillar of Wisdom, David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, a cinematic masterpiece, left an unforgettable mark with its visual storytelling on cinema. However, what is problematic about this film is that it epitomizes the white savior and heroism trope. Beneath its cinematic achievement lies the representation of the East as uncivilized, intellectually void, and irrational while T.E Lawrence, a British officer, becomes a literal unifier and saviour of Arab tribes during the First World War. Moreover, the Arab characters are often devoid of narrative depth and in need of someone to save them- a Westerner.

 Overall, orientalism is about having an authority through perceptions. It is a deeper ideological framework through which the West define the East. The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity, a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories, and landscapes, remarkable experiences (1978). The portrayal of the Orient often reflect Western fantasies and power structures, constructing the East as ‘the other’ through exotic gaze.