section_path: Issues/Orientalism and imaginative geography
section_name: Orientalism and imaginative geography
paragraph_text: Orientalism and imaginative geography
  
  Imperial control, territorial and cultural, is justified through discourses about the imperialists' understanding of different spaces. Conceptually, imagined geographies explain the limitations of the imperialist understanding of the societies of the different spaces inhabited by the non–European Other.
  
  In Orientalism (1978), Edward Said said that the West developed the concept of The Orient —an imagined geography of the Eastern world —which functions as an essentializing discourse that represents neither the ethnic diversity nor the social reality of the Eastern world. That by reducing the East into cultural essences, the imperial discourse uses place-based identities to create cultural difference and psychologic distance between "We, the West" and "They, the East" and between "Here, in the West" and "There, in the East".
  
  That cultural differentiation was especially noticeable in the books and paintings of early Oriental studies, the European examinations of the Orient, which misrepresented the East as irrational and backward, the opposite of the rational and progressive West. Defining the East as a negative vision of the Western world, as its inferior, not only increased the sense-of-self of the West, but also was a way of ordering the East, and making it known to the West, so that it could be dominated and controlled. Therefore, Orientalism was the ideological justification of early Western imperialism—a body of knowledge and ideas that rationalized social, cultural, political, and economic control of other, non-white peoples.