orientalisms

Noun

orientalism (countable and uncountable, plural orientalisms)

1. The tendency to represent eastern subjects, to assume stylistical characteristics original of the East, especially in 19th century Europe.
   • Moreover, among the group that was associated with the short-lived Institut historique, of which Senancour was a member from 1834 to 1840, was Eugène Burnouf, the great orientalist, to whom much of the responsibility for the revived interest in orientalism of the mid-nineteenth century must be...1935, Iris Esther Robertson Sells, Matthew Arnold and France, London: Cambridge University Press, page 67
2. (countable) An Eastern word, expression, or custom.
   • The Scriptural style and the Scriptural language are not meant for one age, but for all ages. Its orientalisms will grow in the west; its archaisms will be found still young in the nineteenth century.1860, Tayler Lewis, The Divine Human in the Scriptures, New York: R. Carter and Brothers, page 117
3. (capitalized) A patronizing Western attitude towards Middle Eastern, Asian, and North African societies.
   • Unlike the Americans, the French and the British—less so the Germans, Russians, Spanish, Portuguese, Italians, and Swiss—have had a long tradition of what I shall be calling Orientalism, a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western...1978, Edward W. Said, Orientalism, New York: Pantheon Books, →ISBN, page 1