Orientalism

I didn't really know the meaning of hegemony but now that I do I think that it can be applied to all types of situations.  It can be applied to any level such as historical movements or even groups of friends.  Gramsci said that we are trapped in our own cultural perspective.  I would have to agree with that.  It can sometimes be hard to see thing from other people's perspective.  Sometimes a group of people can believe they are the superior group, meaning that every other group is inferior.  Hegemony and orientalism can be linked in that people have this point of view on orientalism and use the word orientals because we simply hear it and repeat it, without knowing that this isn't right, and it isn't right to be a part of it.

Orientalism seems to be used a lot when talking about the arts and trying to describe or depict aspects of Eastern Cultures.  Edward Said and the Europeans first coined this term as he referred to initially people the Ottoman empire but then stretched it to apply to most of Asia.  It has turned out to have a negative connotation to it.  To be honest I did not know anything about orientalism or that it was even a bad thing.  However, as I sat in my living room about to write my blog I explained to my roommate that I didn't have a really good grasp on the overall concept or what was so significant about it.  The funny this is is that my roommate is a government major, and had written a paper on Orientalism for her Middle Eastern Politics class.  From her I learned how people are naive on the situation but that learning where the term orientalism comes from makes you realize why it is a negative term and why it shouldn't be used.  But people don't see this because they get caught up in hearing everyone else use the term and don't understand the harm in using it as well.  But the problem is that people are using the word to describe this huge country with thousands of different groups of people with different values and languages and traditions, but we in the United States are using one word to describe these thousands of different groups.  This just isn't right.  And it also doesn't help that there has always seemed to be a movement from West to East.  Meaning these "orientals" were coming to the US and therefore made the people of the US feel like the superior country.  So we use this word to describe people who we believe are inferior and coming over to this land where we have newer technologies and what not.  I think that the key takeaway from learning about orientalism is to understand where it comes from because that is the only way people will understand that it is not the appropriate word to use and why it has the negative connotation that comes along with it.