Am i drawing a line between
Orientalism & the Orient?
What is Orient?
Near East like Middle East and the Far East like China, India and Japan.
But Orient to whom?
It is widely called The East because of its geographic placement & relation to Europe, America on the world map.
How is Orient percieved?
With very fixed notions of the aesthetic, of the culture, of their progress on historical, social, linguistical, economic planes.
Many of my inherent biases come to the forefront reflexively. Contemplation through this piece of work, retrospectively, became the ignition point of my interest areas. Born in India, how am I speaking the language of the Western gaze so fluently, bypassing my own heritage. How did I get so reductionist in
By the vested capital & academic imperialism of the West, our exposure to the mutli-layered/dimensional/cultural offerings of the vast region that is called ‘The Orient’ is wildly limited. Orientalism is the romantisized deduction of the Orient.
“Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological & epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident’.
The interchange between the academic & the more or less imaginative meanings of Orientalism is a constant one, and since the late eighteenth century, there has been a considerable, quite disciplined- perhaps even regulated- traffic between the two.”
- Edward Said in his book,
‘Orientalism / Published by Penguin Modern Classics
‘Orientalism / Published by Penguin Modern Classics