Reading Orientalism Again: Ten Studies of Representation and Power

Article 1 of 10

“Orientalism in a globalised world: Said in the twenty-first century”

Ahmad H. Sa’di

Argument and Scope

Sa’di asks whether Said’s diagnosis survives neoliberal globalization, digital communication, intensified migration, and the securitization of Muslim populations. His answer is neither simple continuity nor disappearance. Older forms of exoticism and civilizational hierarchy persist, but they coexist with a more adaptable neo-Orientalism that can speak the languages of security, integration, gender equality, and liberal tolerance while continuing to mark populations as deficient or dangerous.

Method and Evidence

The official abstract presents a broad conceptual diagnosis spanning public opinion, media, political elites, and scholarly thought. Its framework joins Said’s discourse analysis to debates over Islamophobia, migration, new racism, and globalized governance. Because the full text was unavailable for independent examination, narrower claims about its corpus are not made here.

Relation to the Book

The article treats Orientalism as a living diagnostic rather than a closed history of nineteenth-century European scholarship. It asks what changes when the object of representation is no longer only a distant colony but also the migrant, citizen, refugee, or security subject within Western states.

About the Author

Ahmad H. Sa’di is an associate professor in the Department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. His work addresses citizenship, surveillance, Palestinian society, and the political production of knowledge.

Editorial Note

The article was formally published online in 2020 and assigned to volume 42, issue 11, in 2021. Both dates are retained because they explain why different databases may cite it differently.

Article 2 of 10

“Traces of orientalism in media studies”

Banafsheh Ranji

Argument and Scope

Ranji turns the critique back upon media studies. De-Westernization has challenged the field’s geographical concentration, she argues, yet its language can reproduce the binary it seeks to overcome: “Western” media remain the unmarked norm, while “non-Western” media are generalized through politics, religion, authoritarianism, or cultural difference. The Iranian case exposes how apparently comparative research can preserve an asymmetrical gaze.

Method and Evidence

This is a reflexive disciplinary essay rather than a quantitative survey. Ranji reads recurring categories and formulations in media-research literature, relates them to her work on Iranian journalism, and draws on the institutional experience of conducting and evaluating scholarship across the West/non-West divide.

Relation to the Book

Said’s method becomes a test of the field’s own positionality. The article is especially useful for readers who want to understand Orientalism not as a catalogue of insulting images but as a structure of comparison in which one location possesses theory and another supplies culturally overdetermined data.

About the Author

Banafsheh Ranji is a postdoctoral fellow in sociology and political science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Her research concerns journalism, media sociology, exile, and the politics of knowledge; the article arose from doctoral work conducted at the University of Oslo.

Article 3 of 10

“From discourse to practice: Orientalism, western policy and the Arab uprisings”

Jasmine K. Gani

Argument and Scope

Gani traces a movement from latent assumptions to manifest policy during the Arab uprisings. Early Western enthusiasm for democratic protest gave way, in many venues, to a narrative of an “Islamist winter.” The shift did not merely describe events: it narrowed the range of imaginable political actors, encouraged selective recognition, and helped shape the uneven support or restraint of British and American policy.

Method and Evidence

Combining discourse analysis with intellectual and policy history, Gani studies commentary from the first year of the uprisings and places it in a longer history of Western representation. A comparison of Chatham House and the Council on Foreign Relations shows how different epistemic communities, sources of regional input, and institutional agendas mediated discourse into policy.

Relation to the Book

This is one of the clearest recent demonstrations of Said’s power/knowledge thesis at work. Rather than stopping at biased language, it identifies the institutional passage between representation and foreign-policy practice—and shows how policy can then return as fresh “evidence” for inherited Orientalist claims.

About the Author

Jasmine K. Gani is assistant professor of international relations theory at the London School of Economics. At the article’s publication she was based at the University of St Andrews. Her research includes race and empire in international relations, Syria, the Middle East, and the politics of knowledge production.

Article 4 of 10

“Gender as the UnSaid: Exploring the Interstices in Edward Said’s Orientalism”

Chantal Zabus

Argument and Scope

Zabus reads gender as an “UnSaid” within Said: a constitutive absence rather than a detachable missing topic. Women, sexual dissidents, and gender outlaws occupy textual and geographic interstices that disturb the apparent stability of East and West. The article therefore asks how the book’s binaries change when bodies and desires excluded from its principal analytical field are restored to view.

Method and Evidence

The approach is feminist, queer, and postcolonial close reading. Zabus works through Said’s language and later post-Orientalist debates, attending to marginal figures and spaces that escape straightforward placement within a masculine imperial encounter. “Interstice” functions both as a textual method and a political geography.

Relation to the Book

The essay neither excuses Said’s limited treatment of gender nor treats the omission as grounds for discarding his framework. Instead, it makes the absence analytically productive: gendered and queer subjects disclose where the architecture of Orientalism becomes porous and where its account of representational power requires revision.

About the Author

Chantal Zabus is a scholar of comparative and postcolonial literature associated with Université Sorbonne Paris Nord. Her research includes African literatures, language, gender, sexuality, and queer postcolonial studies.

Article 5 of 10

“In the Name of the Father: Orientalism, Zionism and Edward Said’s Foundational Status in Postcolonial Studies”

Sneharika Roy

Argument and Scope

Roy repositions Said’s foundational status by returning Orientalism to his sustained writing on Palestine. The book’s canonization in postcolonial-studies anthologies, she argues, can detach its analysis from the political struggle that gave it urgency. Said’s critique of Zionism, American liberal consensus, and Arab nationalism is not an optional supplement but part of the intellectual field in which his study of nineteenth-century Orientalism intervened.

Method and Evidence

The essay combines intellectual history, close reading across Said’s oeuvre, and reception analysis. Its attention to anthologization and disciplinary “founding fathers” asks how excerpts become canonical and what political commitments disappear when a text is converted into a portable theoretical origin.

Relation to the Book

For readers approaching scholarly articles on Orientalism through classroom theory, Roy supplies an essential correction: the book is foundational, but not self-sufficient. “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims” and Said’s Palestinian political essays make explicit the dispossession, representation, and struggle over narrative that abbreviated disciplinary histories can obscure.

About the Author

Sneharika Roy is associate professor at the American University of Paris. She works in comparative literature, postcolonial studies, epic, and creative writing, with particular attention to the forms through which political and literary traditions are transmitted.

Editorial Note

The journal issue carries a 2023 designation, while OpenEdition records the article as online from 5 April 2024. The article qualifies by its formal online publication record.

Article 6 of 10

“Edward Said and Philosophy”

Zeyad el Nabolsy

Argument and Scope

El Nabolsy reconstructs Said’s philosophical commitments through Timothy Brennan’s biography. Said rejects naïve realism—the idea that representations simply mirror an unmediated world—without abandoning truth. His position combines representational mediation with a correspondence account of truth and a non-deterministic standpoint epistemology: social location shapes what can be seen, but does not mechanically guarantee correct knowledge.

Method and Evidence

The piece is a compact exercise in conceptual reconstruction. It reads Brennan alongside Said, compares the resulting position with early-modern epistemology, classical Marxist ideology critique, and contemporary work on epistemologies of ignorance, and distinguishes claims that are often blurred in discussions of discourse.

Relation to the Book

Its value lies in explaining a central puzzle of Orientalism: how can representations be false, socially durable, and causally productive at once? El Nabolsy shows that Said need not choose between a world independent of discourse and the claim that authorized representations reorganize the reality they purport merely to describe.

About the Author

Zeyad el Nabolsy is a scholar of modern African intellectual history with formal training in philosophy and Africana studies. The article lists York University in Toronto as his affiliation; Cornell’s Africana Studies profile records his doctoral work and research on African philosophy and intellectual history.

Article 7 of 10

“Imprints of Islam on Edward Said’s Orientalism”

Nicolás Roser Nebot and Rachida Boubrit

Argument and Scope

Roser Nebot and Boubrit isolate the religious history within Said’s archive. They accept the persistence of anti-Islamic patterns in European representation, but resist treating Western writing as a single hostile block. The article’s scope is chiefly the Arab Muslim Middle East and North Africa, where Christian polemic, philology, literature, and modern expertise produced durable images of Islam.

Method and Evidence

The publisher description indicates a comparative close reading of the writers and traditions that structure Said’s account, including figures such as Dante, Barthélemy d’Herbelot, Ernest Renan, and Bernard Lewis, alongside counterexamples of more equitable engagement. The method tests a historical pattern against variation within the archive.

Relation to the Book

The article sharpens the difference between identifying a recurring representational inheritance and declaring every European account identical. It is useful for readers who want to preserve Said’s critique of religious stereotyping while asking how exceptions, translations, and intellectual crossings complicate the unity of “the West.”

About the Authors

Nicolás Roser Nebot is affiliated with the University of Málaga’s Department of Translation and Interpreting and works on Arabic, translation, and Arab-Islamic intellectual history. Rachida Boubrit’s work is likewise connected to translation and Arabic studies at Málaga.

Article 8 of 10

“Orientalism, Liberal Empire, and the 2003 Iraq War”

Joseph Stieb

Argument and Scope

Stieb agrees that essentialized difference helped justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but argues that this Saidian explanation is incomplete. Liberal universalism—the assertion that supposedly universal values authorized transformative intervention—also supplied an imperial rationale. More provocatively, opponents of the war could deploy Orientalist binaries and stereotypes in arguments for restraint.

Method and Evidence

The official abstract describes a historical analysis of the war’s intellectual and cultural origins within the longer history of liberal empire. It treats cultural ideas as politically multidirectional: the same representational repertoire can support invasion, pessimism about democratization, or non-intervention. Detailed archival claims are omitted here because the full text was not independently reviewed.

Relation to the Book

The article revises a one-way application of Orientalism. Said clarifies how difference can license domination; Stieb adds that sameness, universalism, and civilizational uplift can do imperial work too, while Orientalist difference may occasionally be mobilized against intervention. Context, not vocabulary alone, determines political effect.

About the Author

Joseph Stieb is a historian of United States foreign relations and national-security thought. The article lists the Department of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College as his institutional affiliation.

Editorial Note

The article is included because the official abstract establishes a distinctive, substantive intervention. Claims beyond that record have deliberately not been reconstructed.

Article 9 of 10

“Epistemologies of Domination: Colonial Encounters, Heterology, and Postcolonial Pedagogy”

Alina Sajed

Argument and Scope

Sajed develops the “epistemology of domination”: the patterned ways an oppressor knows, classifies, and narrates the oppressed. Reverse-gaze accounts of colonial encounters reveal three recurrent problems—the politics of representation, the denial of coevalness that makes colonized societies appear belated, and an overemphasis on Western agency that can inadvertently reproduce the dominance under criticism.

Method and Evidence

The article joins comparative political theory, intellectual history, and critical pedagogy. Through readings of Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Ashis Nandy, Zeynep Çelik, Michel de Certeau, Maxime Rodinson, and Ottoman and Arab counter-gazes, it develops “heterology”—knowledge of the other that remains alert to reciprocity, temporal coexistence, and asymmetrical power.

Relation to the Book

Sajed retains Said’s central problem while criticizing the linearity and geographical restriction of his narrative. Orientalism can overstate Western authorship of the colonial encounter and underrepresent the intellectual agency of those observed. Her pedagogical alternative asks scholars to study domination without making Europe the sole source of historical movement.

About the Author

Alina Sajed is associate professor of political science at McMaster University. Her work spans international-relations theory, colonialism and decolonization, the Global South, comparative political theory, and North Africa and the Middle East.

Article 10 of 10

“Cold War Orientalism and the Making of Islam in International Relations”

Turan Kayaoglu

Argument and Scope

Kayaoglu names a specific formation: “Cold War Orientalism,” the fusion of inherited Orientalist assumptions with strategic anxiety about religion, communism, and geopolitical alignment. The article shows how reductive accounts of Islamic political thought entered international relations not only as prejudice from outside the discipline but as part of its conceptual and professional formation.

Method and Evidence

Using contextual intellectual history associated with the Cambridge School, Kayaoglu reconstructs the work and setting of Majid Khadduri, while comparing figures such as Bernard Lewis and currents including Realpolitik and the Islamization of Knowledge. The evidence links scholarly authority, disciplinary canonization, and Cold War strategic usefulness.

Relation to the Book

Said treated Lewis at length but gave Khadduri only brief attention. Kayaoglu supplies the disciplinary genealogy that Orientalism left undeveloped: how “Islam” became a static, strategically legible object within international relations. The result extends Said’s power/knowledge critique into the construction of a modern academic field and argues for epistemic plurality rather than a replacement canon with a single center.

About the Author

Turan Kayaoglu is associate vice chancellor for faculty affairs and professor of political science at the University of Colorado Denver. His scholarship addresses international relations, religion, human rights, international organizations, and the political history of knowledge about Islam.