A description of the West's depiction of the cultures of the Eastern Hemisphere, orientalism became a political term through the work of Edward Said (1978), for whom orientalism means European academic and popular discourse about the Orient, expressed through colonial bureaucracies and styles, doctrines, imagery, scholarship, and vocabulary. (In this, he was heavily influenced by Michel Foucault, and his concept of imagined geographies.) Said argued that ‘the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience’. In other words, to Western eyes, orientalism is what the West is not; orientalism is other. By representing the East as an exotic, bizarre, and inferior attachment, the Orientalists made colonial conquest a natural and logical extension of the rise of the West. Samuel Huntington (1993) Foreign Affairs 72, 3, for example, divides huge sections of the Earth into ‘civilization groups’, with Western civilizations at the top of the hierarchy, and D. Gregory (2004) shows how the Western powers have reproduced and extended the orientalist scripting of the Middle East in current-day Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq.

R. Guha and G. Spivak (1988) criticize Said's work for ignoring voices of resistance within the Middle East, while H. Bhabha (1995) dismisses a clear separation between colonizers and colonized, recognizing ‘the ambivalence, hybridity, and mimicry found in colonial representations of Orientalised places and, at the same time, to the same phenomena in the self-representations of colonized peoples’. See Jouhki (2002) J@rgonia 8 on Indo-Orientalist essentialism.