Afterword

But there is neither East nor West, border, nor breed, nor birthWhen two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth ! R. Kipling, The Ballad of East and West, 1889. Edward Said’s Orientalism has been endlessly reinterpreted and re-used over the past 35 years, all too often in a spirit of violent partisanship which views his text either as a new orthodoxy to be upheld or a heresy to be refuted. Whether genuflecting before Orientalism or attacking it, however, it..