Reflections on Said's "Orientalism"

Its relevance to understanding our present moment and to how we think about innovation in Canada in 2026

Photo by Jonny Caspari on Unsplash

Fair warning, this is going to be a nerdy post that gets into the weeds!

Happy Wednesday! I just finished rereading Edward Said’s Orientalism last night, and I have lots of thoughts and reflections on it that I want to write about today. I mentioned some of these themes in a post a few weeks back while I was still working my way through the book, but I want to expand upon them a bit here.

I first read Orientalism back during my PhD. My research focused on British foreign policy in the early nineteenth century, and given that the fate of the Ottoman Empire—the so-called “Eastern Question”—was a major focus at the time, Said’s work was highly relevant.

However, it has been a different experience altogether returning to it this year. With time and perspective, I have a new appreciation for how astounding a piece of work it is, thanks to the breadth and depth of the scholarship, the clarity and effectiveness of the arguments, and the timeliness of his analysis.

I wanted to revisit it with an eye primarily towards Palestine and a better understanding of the current framing of the genocide underway there. As Said maps out, the dehumanization of Palestinians, and Arabs more generally, is not a new phenomenon. It is rooted in centuries of academic and literary work, butressed by the institutional architecture of Orientalism.

For Said, the Orientalist discourse was an exercise in power — the power of the “West” to create an “Orient” and, through their superior knowledge, dominate it. Whether in its more historical or more modern form, this kind of discourse sees

the difference between cultures, first, as creating a battlefront that separates them, and second, as inviting the West to control, contain, and otherwise govern (through superior knowledge and accommodating power) the Other.

This subversion of the distinctness and difference of actual humans into these created broader “us” and “them” cultures is obviously a major feature of today’s discourse, not just on Palestine, but also in so many other settings.

Take Said’s question of how we can even talk of “Western civilization” except as “in large measure an ideological fiction, implying a sort of detached superiority for a handful of values and ideas, none of which has much meaning outside the history of conquest, immigration, travel and the mingling of peoples that gave the Western nations their present mixed identities?”

There are clear echoes of this today in how white nationalists create ideological fictions of “white culture.” Just last week, there was a clear example in the confirmation hearing for Jeremy Carl, Trump’s nominee for Assistant Secretary of State for the UN and International Organizations. Senators questioned him on his many anti-Semitic and racist statements, and in the hearing, Carl tried to defend his view that “white culture” is being erased from America and that “whites are victims of cultural genocide.” The extent to which this is a fiction designed to create battlefronts for the exercise of power is clear from how quickly such views crumble under pointed questioning.

In short, if you want to understand this political moment, Said’s writing should be a part of your reading list.

However, I think there is relevance to Orientalism beyond that big-picture view, specifically in relation to innovation and technology.

There are two key components of Said’s arguments that particularly resonated with me. The first is how fields of learning:

are constrained and acted upon by society, by cultural traditions, by worldly circumstance, and by stabilizing influences like schools, libraries, and governments; moreover, that both learned and imaginative writing are never free, but are limited in their imagery, assumptions, and intentions; and finally, that the advances made by a “science” like Orientalism in its academic form are less objectively true than we often like to think.

The second is Said’s emphasis on the importance of examining Orientalism as a discourse to understand how Europe could “manage and even produce the Orient, politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively.”

It is essential to recognize how innovation and technology, as fields of learning and discourse, are profoundly shaped by society, cultural traditions and so on. Who is shaping that discourse? Who are given platforms and who are not? What types of arguments and evidence are allowed and valued, and what types are pushed to the side or suppressed? What types of institutions are created to perpetuate certain forms of learning and discourse?

This leads quickly to the need to look more closely at power dynamics. As Said argued, ideas “cannot be seriously be understood or studied without their force, or more precisely their configurations of power, also being studied.” Yet the mere existence of very real “configurations of power” is rarely even acknowledged, let alone examined critically.

Though the resurgence of sovereignty as a prominent topic has drawn greater attention to the power the US holds over Canada’s economy, that is only part of the picture of power when it comes to innovation and technology. The power of incumbents in the Canadian economy, the power of corporate lobbyists to shape government framing of innovation questions and their regulatory and funding approaches, the power of shareholders to prioritize short-term gains over long-term risky innovation, and the power of ecosystem institutional leaders shape the innovation discourse: all are configurations of power that matter.

As far as I’m aware, examining and mapping Canadian innovation in these terms is not a topic of study for anyone right now, let alone an area where substantive work is underway to identify and shape different ways forward. If I’m wrong in that, then please correct me!

Ultimately, there is a real need to reshape the innovation discourse in Canada and its underlying power structures. We must move away from the constructed fictions that maintain a flawed status quo and towards a discourse and power structure that benefits real people across the country and beyond.