Angel Martinez’s Reviews > Orientalism > Status Update

"It is as if, having once settled on the Orient as a locale suitable for incarnating the infinite in a finite shape, Europe could not stop this practice; the Orient and the Oriental, Arab, Islamic, Indian, Chinese, or whatever, became repetitious pseudo-incarnations of some great original (Christ, Europe, the West) they were supposed to have been imitating" (pg 62).

Orientalists conceive of the differences between cultures as 1) "creating a battlefront that separates them" and 2) "as inviting the West to control, contain, and otherwise govern (through superior knowledge and accommodating power) the Other"(47-48 ).

The only culture the "West" has is based on homicidal violence and rape. Just look at the West's pedophilic beauty standards too

Lord Cromer (a colonial official for Britain first in India then Egypt) framed "cosmopolitanism" (an Egypt that includes Britain and British occupation as part of it's identity) against "narrow nationalism, which will only embrace native Egyptians" (p 37)

Interesting use of cosmopolitanism

Preface page xxii

"We allow justly that the Holocaust has permanently altered the consciousness of our time: Why do we not accord the same epistemological mutation in what imperialism has done, and what Orientalism continues to do?"