Page 162 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

OTHER (THE)

been constituted by an imagery and vocabulary that have given it a specific kind of
reality and presence within Western culture. In particular, the idea of Orientalism
suggests that racism is not simply a matter of individual psychology or pathology,
but rather is constituted through patterns of cultural representation deeply 139
ingrained within the practices, discourses and subjectivities of Western societies.
Orientalism is a set of Western discourses of power that have constructed an
Orient – have Orientalized the Orient – in ways that depend on and reproduce the
positional superiority and hegemony of the West. For Said, Orientalism was a
general group of ideas impregnated with European superiority, racism and
imperialism that are elaborated and distributed through a variety of texts and
practices. Orientalism is argued to be a system of representations that brought the
Orient into Western learning. These include Flaubert’s encounter with an Egyptian
courtesan that produced an influential image of the Oriental woman who never
spoke for herself, never showed her emotions and lacked agency or history. That is,
the sexually beguiling dark maiden of male power-fantasies. In contrast, the
Oriental male is seen as wily, fanatical, cruel and despotic.
In this respect, the contemporary elevation of ‘Islam’ to the role of chief
bogeyman in Western news follows a well-worn path. Long before the current
twenty-first-century crisis of relations between the West and Islam, Said argued that
the Western media represented Islamic peoples as irrational fanatics led by
messianic and authoritarian leaders. In recent years, a great deal of news coverage
in the West has been devoted to such matters as the states of Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq
and Libya (with a special emphasis on their alleged sponsoring of terrorism), the
fatwa declared by Ayatollah Khomeini against Salman Rushdie, the US-led conflicts
between the West and Iraq including the 2003 war, and, of course, Osama Bin
Laden and the tragedy of 11 September 2001.
Thus we may note a certain imbalance in the cultural representation of Islam
within the West. There is a concentration on the violence of some Islamic
fundamentalists but little exploration of the reasons for this hostility towards the
West and the part played by Western cultural and political actions in fuelling
conflict. Nor is it often reported that Islam is seen by most of its adherents as a
philosophy and religion of love and peaceful cooperation.

Links Cultural imperialism, discourse, globalization, power, representation

Other (the) The notion of the Other is closely linked to those of identity and
difference in that identity is understood to be defined in part by its difference from
the Other. I am male because I am not female, I am heterosexual because I am not
homosexual, I am white because I am not black and so forth. Such binaries of
difference usually involve a relationship of power, of inclusion and exclusion, in
that one of the pair is empowered with a positive identity and the other side of the
equation becomes the subordinated Other.
One theoretical source for this idea is the master–slave discussion staged by the
philosopher Hegel and another is the deconstruction of the binaries of Western
philosophy found in the work of Derrida. In both cases the identities of each side