This is an investigation of Western cultural identity. It shows how people's images of themselves and others reflect the power that different groups in a society have to shape these images. The contributors describe these images in Western academic writing, popular Western culture, and societies outside the West, in this counterpart to Edward Said's Orientalism. - ;Occidentalism is an investigation of images of Western cultural identity. Edward Said's Orientalism revolutionized Western understanding of non-Western cultures by showing how Western projected images shaped the Occidental of the Orient, but those who follow Said have not until now reflected that understanding back onto Western societies. Occidentalism shows how images of the West shape people's conceptions of themselves and others, and how these images are in turn shaped by members of Western and non-Western societies alike. The contributors describe and explicate these images in a variety of areas, from Western academic writing to popular Western culture, from societies within and outside the West, to show how power and conflict shape such conceptions. -

Twenty-five years ago, Edward Said's Orientalism spawned a generation of scholarship on the denigrating and dangerous mirage of "the East" in the Western colonial mind. But "the West" is the more dangerous mirage of our own time, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit argue, and the idea of "the West" in the minds of its self-proclaimed enemies remains largely unexamined and woefully misunderstood. Occidentalism is their groundbreaking investigation of the demonizing fantasies and stereotypes about the Western world that fuel such hatred in the hearts of others. We generally understand "radical Islam" as a purely Islamic phenomenon, but Buruma and Margalit show that while the Islamic part of radical Islam certainly is, the radical part owes a primary debt of inheritance to the West. Whatever else they are, al Qaeda and its ilk are revolutionary anti-Western political movements, and Buruma and Margalit show us that the bogeyman of the West who stalks their thinking is the same one who has haunted the thoughts of many other revolutionary groups, going back to the early nineteenth century. In this genealogy of the components of the anti-Western worldview, the same oppositions appear again and again: the heroic revolutionary versus the timid, soft bourgeois; the rootless, deracinated cosmopolitan living in the Western city, cut off from the roots of a spiritually healthy society; the sterile Western mind, all reason and no soul; the machine society, controlled from the center by a cabal of insiders—often Jews—pulling the hidden levers of power versus an organically knit-together one, a society of "blood and soil." The anti-Western virus has found a ready host in the Islamic world for a number of legitimate reasons, they argue, but in no way does that make it an exclusively Islamic matter. A work of extraordinary range and erudition, Occidentalism will permanently enlarge our collective frame of vision

Negative portrayals of the West in Iran are often centred around the CIA-engineered coup of 1953, which overthrew Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, or the hostage-taking crisis in 1979 following the attack on the US embassy in Tehran. Looking past these iconic events, Ehsan Bakhshandeh explores the deeper anti-imperialistic and anti-hegemonic roots of the hostility to Westernism that is evident in the Iranian press. Distinguishing between negative and outright hostile perceptions of the West - which also encompasses Britain, France and Germany - the book traces how the West is represented as the `Occident' in the country's media. From the Qajar period and the Tobacco protests of the late nineteenth century to the ill-fated Anglo-Persian Treaty of 1919, through to the 1953 coup and 1979 hostage crisis, Bakshandeh highlights the various points in history when misinterpretations and conflicts led to a demonisation of the `other' in the Iranian media. The major recent source of contention between the West and Iran has of course been the nuclear issue and the resultant regime of sanctions. By examining how this and other issues have been represented by the Iranian press, Bakshandeh offers a crucial and often-overlooked aspect of the key relationship between Iran and the West.

The central argument of Edward Said’s Orientalism is that the relationship between Britain and its colonies was primarily oppositional, based on contrasts between conquest abroad and domestic order at home. Saree Makdisi directly challenges that premise in Making England Western, identifying the convergence between the British Empire’s civilizing mission abroad and a parallel mission within England itself, and pointing to Romanticism as one of the key sites of resistance to the imperial culture in Britain after 1815. Makdisi argues that there existed places and populations in both England and the colonies that were thought of in similar terms—for example, there were sites in England that might as well have been Arabia, and English people to whom the idea of the freeborn Englishman did not extend. The boundaries between “us” and “them” began to take form during the Romantic period, when England became a desirable Occidental space, connected with but superior to distant lands. Delving into the works of Wordsworth, Austen, Byron, Dickens, and others to trace an arc of celebration, ambivalence, and criticism influenced by these imperial dynamics, Makdisi demonstrates the extent to which Romanticism offered both hopes for and warnings against future developments in Occidentalism. Revealing that Romanticism provided a way to resist imperial logic about improvement and moral virtue, Making England Western is an exciting contribution to the study of both British literature and colonialism.

A groundbreaking critique of the West's historical, cultural, and political perceptions of the East that is—three decades after its first publication—one of the most important books written about our divided world. "Intellectual history on a high order ... and very exciting." —The New York Times In this wide-ranging, intellectually vigorous study, Said traces the origins of "orientalism" to the centuries-long period during which Europe dominated the Middle and Near East and, from its position of power, defined "the orient" simply as "other than" the occident. This entrenched view continues to dominate western ideas and, because it does not allow the East to represent itself, prevents true understanding.

This book highlights the role of cultural representations and perceptions, such as when Iran is represented in the French media as a rogue state obsessed with its nuclear programme, and when France is portrayed in the Iranian media as a decadent and imperialist country. Here, Laetitia Nanquette examines the functions, processes, and mechanisms of stereotyping and imagining the "other" that have pervaded the literary traditions of France and Iran when writing about each other. She furthermore analyzes Franco-Iranian relations by exploring the literary traditions of this relationship, the ways in which these have affected individual authors, and how they reflect socio-political realities. With themes that feed into popular debates about the nature of Orientalism and Occidentalism, and how the two interact, this book will be vital for researchers of Middle Eastern literature and its relationship with writings from the West, as well as those working on the cultures of the Middle East.

In Mughal Occidentalism, Mika Natif elucidates the meaningful and complex ways in which Mughal artists engaged with European art and techniques from the 1580s-1630s. Using visual and textual sources, this book argues that artists repurposed Christian and Renaissance visual idioms to embody themes from classical Persian literature and represent Mughal policy, ideology and dynastic history. A reevaluation of illustrated manuscripts and album paintings incorporating landscape scenery, portraiture, and European objects demonstrates that the appropriation of European elements was highly motivated by Mughal concerns. This book aims to establish a better understanding of cross-cultural exchange from the Mughal perspective by emphasizing the agency of local artists active in the workshops of Emperors Akbar and Jahangir.