305d
@kewpie said"Tellingly, [Edward Said's grounbreaking book] Orientalism opens with this Karl Marx quote: “They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.” As Thomas Babington Macaulay, the British politician who imposed English colonial education on India, once infamously stated, it could not be denied that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” Given the assumed superiority of Western culture and literature, it fell to the West to represent the East. Western colonial powers assumed this paternalistic obligation by manufacturing the body of theory and practice that became the “Orient.” This representation permeates our culture; you’ve almost certainly come across classic Orientalist products before. To this day, they form some of our most enduring images of the alien “East.” Remember the feral child Mowgli in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, or the meek Indian servants in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden? These representations illuminate how insidiously Orientalism functions — by exaggerating, essentializing, and exploiting the supposed difference between the East and the West, Orientalism legitimized Western white supremacy."
Orientalism.
Didn't know it was a word. What do Oriental colonialists think of it?
~ https://www.teenvogue.com/story/what-is-orientalism