There are two things to note from the above discussion. First, that the forms of colonial dispossession, conquest and discovery through which Europe variously annexed its territorial colonies, were in fact enabled by Orientalising ways of seeing the non-west. In other words, cultural representations of the non-west, the Orient, were never far from power. It was precisely the ability of the west to authoritatively represent the peoples and places of the east as at one and the same time passive, exotic, undeveloped, barbaric and alluring, that laid the foundation for contact, dispossession and colonial rule by imperial powers. Just as there is a vast tradition of 18thand 19th-century European Orientalist painters (Figure 1), novelists and mapmakers, it is significant that there is no similar South Asian, African or Middle Eastern artistic or literary tradition of representing Europe. With Orientalism, power flows one way. Second, Said’s whole thesis is profoundly geographical, and for geography educators the opening pages of Orientalism should be of especial interest. As Said wrote: We must take seriously [the] … great observation that men make their own history, that what they can know is what they have made, and extend it to geography: as both geographical and cultural entities – to say nothing of historical entities – such locales, regions, geographical sectors as “Orient” and “Occident” are man-made. (Said, 1978, pp. 4–5) To use Orientalism to begin to think postcolonially, therefore, is to begin to think geographically (Blunt and McEwan, 2002). Despite its birth in literary studies, postcolonialism is an inherently geographical mode of thought. It encourages us to consider the ways we think about distant and different elsewheres, the connections familiar from globalisation, immigration or cultural hybridity, and the western and imperial origins of the spaces and places we take for granted. Thinking postcolonially is to critically probe our own geographical imaginations (Gregory, 1994).
he forms of colonial dispossession, conquest and discovery through which Europe variously annexed its territorial colonies, were in fact enabled by Orientalising ways of seeing the non-west. ultural representations of the non-west, the Orient, were never far from power. It was precisely the ability of the west to authoritatively represent the peoples and places of the east as at one and the same time passive, laid the foundation for contact, dispossession and colonial rule by imperial powers. it is significant that there is no similar South Asian, African or Middle Eastern artistic or literary tradition of representing Europe. With Orientalism, power flows one way. Second, Said’s whole thesis is profoundly geographical, and for geography educators the opening pages of Orientalism should be of especial interest.