In Orientalism, Said looks at the cultural and historical forces that built the Western understanding of the Near East, focusing heavily on the 18th century and probably most emblematically in the histories of Napoleon’s conquests in Egypt. He especially focuses on the idea of a “textual attitude”, where one’s concept of something is entirely built through reading about it (or in contemporary version reading about it online or seeing film and tv about it) as the primary way that people understood the Near East. In […]