Orientalism is a type of discourse that assumes a binary opposition of West and East, home and foreign, normal and strange, moral and debauched, etc. The language of Orientalism
"brings opposites together as 'natural,' it presents human types in scholarly idioms and methodologies, it ascribes reality and reference to objects (other words) of its own making. Mythic language is discourse, that is, it cannot be anything but systematic; one does not really make discourse at will, or statements in it, without first belonging — in some cases unconsciously, but at any rate involuntarily — to the ideology and the institutions that guarantee its existence. These latter are always the institutions of an advanced society dealing with a less advanced society, a strong culture encountering a weak one. The principal feature of mythic discourse is that it conceals its own origins as well as those of what it describes. 'Arabs' are presented in the imagery of static, almost ideal types, and neither as creatures with a potential in the process of being realized nor as history being made."
Edward Said, Orientalism
For more, see my article: "What is 'Orientalism'? Edward Said's definition of the term" (10-minute read), Medium
The idea of "oriental" has been imposed on people in various ways to mark them as different, dangerous, or unworthy. For example, in Löwenthal and Guterman's study of fascist discourse, especially U.S. rhetoric against Jews:
"Among these alleged distinctive traits, there is first of all the Jew’s undefinable foreignness. The word epitomizing this trait of foreignness is 'oriental' or 'Asiatic.' The agitator speaks deprecatingly of 'orientals who are American citizens,' of oriental concepts of government, of oriental mobs that overrun the White House, of oriental aliens that invade our rich nation and rifle the cash register, etc., etc. Associations of the forbidden, immoral, and luscious seem to play a role in the use of the term 'oriental.'"
Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman. Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949. pp. 76–77.
"...growing backlash against the Damascus Affair, when local Jews were accused of the ritual murder and consumption of a Capuchin friar and his assistant in 1840. Fueled by the revival of the blood libel canard and stereotyping of Jews from that part of the world as sexually aggressive and libertine, French Jews (including James and Solomon Rothschild) who supported their ‘Oriental’ coreligionists had their loyalty doubted and their motives questioned again and again."
Mike Rothschild, Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories, Melville House, 2023, Chapter 4. Citing: Julie Kalman, “Sensuality, Depravity, and Ritual Murder: The Damascus Blood Libel and Jews in France,” Jewish Social Studies 13, no. 3 (2007): 35–58. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4467774
Suez Canal
Anthony Trollope has a short story, "An Unprotected Female at the Pyramids," first published in 1861 midway through the construction of the Suez. It begins:
"In the happy days when we were young, no description conveyed to us so complete an idea of mysterious reality as that of an Oriental city. We knew it was actually there, but had such vague notions of its ways and looks! Let any one remember his early impressions as to Bagdad or Grand Cairo, and then say if this was not so. It was probably taken from the “Arabian Nights,” and the picture produced was one of strange, fantastic, luxurious houses; of women who were either very young and very beautiful, or else very old and very cunning; but in either state exercising much more influence in life than women in the East do now; of good-natured, capricious, though sometimes tyrannical monarchs; and of life full of quaint mysteries, quite unintelligible in every phasis, and on that account the more picturesque."
Trollope continues:
"But the route to India and Australia has changed all this. Men from all countries going to the East, now pass through Cairo, and its streets and costumes are no longer strange to us. It has become also a resort for invalids, or rather for those who fear that they may become invalids if they remain in a cold climate during the winter months. And thus at Cairo there is always to be found a considerable population of French, Americans, and of English. Oriental life is brought home to us, dreadfully diluted by western customs, and the delights of the “Arabian Nights” are shorn of half their value. When we have seen a thing it is never so magnificent to us as when it was half unknown.
It is not much that we deign to learn from these Orientals,—we who glory in our civilisation. We do not copy their silence or their abstemiousness, nor that invariable mindfulness of his own personal dignity which always adheres to a Turk or to an Arab. We chatter as much at Cairo as elsewhere, and eat as much and drink as much, and dress ourselves generally in the same old ugly costume. But we do usually take upon ourselves to wear red caps, and we do ride on donkeys.
Nor are the visitors from the West to Cairo by any means confined to the male sex. Ladies are to be seen in the streets quite regardless of the Mahommedan custom which presumes a veil to be necessary for an appearance in public; and, to tell the truth, the Mahommedans in general do not appear to be much shocked by their effrontery.
A quarter of the town has in this way become inhabited by men wearing coats and waistcoats, and by women who are without veils; but the English tongue in Egypt finds its centre at Shepheard’s Hotel.
Mike Rothschild, in Jewish Space Lasers, mentions Trollope as someone who used “thinly veiled Rothschild or Jewish banker caricatures as financier villains and scapegoats.” Rothschild goes on to discuss the Suez Canal:
“The [Suez] canal had opened in 1869, with its construction taking eleven years, funded mostly by the French government, and carried out at least partly by forced laborers who died by the thousands. The canal was seen by England as a threat to their geopolitical dominance and dismissed as too risky by other major players like Russia, Austria, and the US, none of which invested in it.
But by 1875, debt from the canal’s massive construction cost, the bankruptcy of the Ottoman Empire (another shareholder), and the profligate overspending of the Egyptian Khedive (viceroy) forced Egypt to sell their share in the Suez Company.” (Chapter 5)
There are academic roots
For example:
"Friedrich [Schlegel] being Friedrich, he had found a new subject. Making use of Persian and Indian manuscripts the French had plundered from libraries and private collections while on their warpath across Europe, Friedrich Schlegel now began to study Persian and Sanskrit. ‘I feel unbelievably drawn to Oriental things,’ he wrote to Ludwig Tieck, buzzing with new ideas about the importance of Sanskrit as ‘the root of all language’ and its influence on Greek, Latin and the Germanic languages. He was so obsessed with the subject that he published the first comprehensive study of Sanskrit in Germany in 1808, On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians, which also included translations of ancient texts."
Andrea Wulf. Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self. Knopf, 2022.
Also, tourism
"In Tangier, Emily Sibley Watson has an opportunity to visit women in a harem, an event that was becoming popular for tourists in the late 19th century. Sarah Graham-Brown, in Images of Women: The Portrayal of Women in Photography of the Middle East 1860-1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988, p. 77-78), writes that: 'with neither common language nor comprehension of each other's cultures, these encounters could be almost comic in their air of mutual incomprehension.'" — Sibley Watson Digital Archive
Ancient history
"This was always the Greek take on Persians: they weren’t real men. A famous Attic red-figure wine jug commemorates the Greek victory over these stereotyped foes. The Eurymedon Vase (ca. 460 BCE) depicts a Greek soldier, erect phallus in hand, approaching a Persian victim from behind as the latter bends over in horror. While these Greeks drank to their victories, they liked to remember how they really gave it to those Persians, so to speak."
Stephen J. Patterson. The Forgotten Creed: Christianity’s Original Struggle against Bigotry, Slavery, and Sexism. New York: Oxford University Press. 2018. pp. 33–34.See also
Sensuality, Depravity, and Ritual Murder: The Damascus Blood Libel and Jews in France. Julie Kalman, Jewish Social Studies, New Series, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Spring - Summer, 2007), pp. 35-58 (24 pages). Published By: Indiana University Press
Homonationalism is orientalist:
