HEATHER HORN: At the heart of Said’s critique of Western treatment of the “Orient” is the observation that even romanticizing something is a way of diminishing it, rendering it two-dimensional. “Orientalism,” according to the postcolonialists, is about emphasizing the differences between East and West, exoticizing them, seeing one, for example, as spiritual and the other as material: “By the time she sat down, the harmony of angels had vanquished the tinny background music from every corporate space on the planet.” Or seeing one as ancient and the other as modern: “her brown eyes were pools of empathy evolved through a thousand generations of what was good and decent in the history of the human race.” In fact, Said was particularly cognizant of the way these trends manifested in Western perceptions of Eastern, Muslim women, in part because he felt the sexualization of the Orient was vital to Western justification for imperialism: the East was a female sex object ready for Western male penetration–the veil was made to be removed. Completely unintentionally, this paragraph, with its joint focus on Abedin’s beauty and her otherness, is a classic of the genre. More here.