three characteristics of Orientalism?

Answer 1

I was under the impression that the term 'Oriental" and it's directives was politically incorrect. Asian or Pacific rim nations I believe is the accepted terminology.

In the former meaning, the term Orientalism has come to acquire negative connotations in some quarters and is interpreted to refer to the study of the East by Westerners shaped by the attitudes of the era of European imperialism in the 18th and 19th centuries. When used in this sense, it implies old-fashioned and prejudiced outsider interpretations of Eastern cultures and peoples. This viewpoint was most famously articulated and propagated by Edward Said in his controversial 1978 book Orientalism, which was critical of this scholarly tradition and of modern scholars including Princeton University professor Bernard Lewis.


And if I'm wrong...
...never mind.

Answer 2

Have you read the book? It is actually quite interesting and still applicable to this day. Some of the main characteristics of Orientalism are that:

Asians (formerly called "Orientals") are more passive/feminine--this was the reasoning and justification of Western domination over the East. They viewed it as their "duty" to protect the naive and helpless Asians. The backwards ideology is what lead to the slavery of Africans (they were "savages" so it was their "duty" to civilize them).

Asians were also seen as exotic. Though this may not seem as a negative up front, it became a sort of obsession and class marker to have an "Oriental" as a servant. The music, clothing, and lifestyle were seen as strange elements and the people were treated as if they were animals in a zoo.

Answer 3

General philosophical concern:
Otherness and the Orient, resistance and subversion

Three specific characteristics: Discourses about;
1. identity politics and politics of location,
2. historical colonial distortions of “home” and the attempts to reclaim/reconstruct new cultural homes since one “can never go home again” after colonial experience,
3. Homi Bhabha’s views on culture as a strategy of survival in his discussion of transnational and translational discourses of displacement.