This is somewhat of an esoteric post, so the parlance is extremely unfamiliar without delving into Said's work. Despite not being a historian, Edward Said has had a considerable impact on oriental authors in studying the Orient. His 1978 book "Orientalism" accentuated several flaws by oriental authors, some of which were literary misrepresentations, and others were pictorial misrepresentations. His book was a critique of the Occidental representational methodology. Said quotes Marx: "They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.” He deemed some of those misrepresentations as unjust and sometimes operated within a colonialist framework. So, my question is directed to those who had studied Edward Said's work, did it influence your methodology in studying the Orient? Do you consider Orientalism when reading a book that addresses the history, politics, religions of the eastern world? Any info you can provide on Edward said will be appreciated.
I am a Historian-in-studying so I am not the biggest professional but you asked about personal relations to the work of Edward Said so here goes nothing. A part of my last course dealt with Edward Said's work, Orientalism, and focused on the notions of different discourses. Discourses is a bit iffy to define but in essence it is about how you decide to interpret the world around you. Historical materialism, great person theory etc are other examples of maybe a bit grander discourse theories than Orientalism but they are sort of similar in some ways.
For me it did a lot in understanding Orientalism, similarily it helped in interpreting older works that actively used Orientalism in its arguments and how different historical discourses are defined. The way Said presented Orientalism explains a lot of the baseline assumptions europeans had about the Orient. Orientalism as presented by Said represent a sort of science that wasn't really built on facts or empiricism but more on popular beliefs considered fact by the people of the time.
What Edward Said does is to present Orientalism as a creation by "westerners" that are interpreting the eastern world and seeing it from a western perspective instead of actually listening to the views of people living in the area. This leads to generalisation, exotification and a general presentation of the "orient" as a form of opposite to the west.
There are however still some weaknesses to his text. He for example doesn't present the creation of a generalised, stereotypical image of people from other areas as a possibility outside of the Orientalism, he is also primarily focusing on specifically the Middle East and Europe's relations, not talking very much about the rest of Eurasia and other parts of the world
In the end however it is in my opinion still a really good work if you want to understand some of the core that is the presentation of the near east in a lot of historical works. It was a really influential work for me and most of my class. I still cite him at times and he is present in discussions about the subject. Even the people that disagreed with him used his arguments and could concede some credit to what he said. In the end it is always good to have different ways of looking at history regardless if you agree with that view or not.
Source: The book
(I read the rules but this is my first reply, maybe I failed and in that case just delete it.)