Building Worlds: Orientalism

It was Saladin Ahmed's article on the issue of race on Game of Thrones that made me think I should add Edward Said's Orientalism to my collection of posts here. When a piece went up on the Tor website about racial diversity in Dungeons & Dragons, it pretty much solidified it for me. Neither of them have to do explicitly with the subject of Said's book, but they touch on part of his thesis: that literary representations of 'the Orient' are part of a discourse that's shared with academic disciplines devoted to its study as well as to the exercise of Western political power. To put it another way, fiction isn't exempt from the political or social attitudes of its day; it can serve to reinforce those attitudes, whether the author intends it or not.


'The Orient' itself is a vague term. It doesn't describe a geographical region, though its broad purview is the Middle East and Asia, but an imaginative one: orientalism, by Said's definition, is the body of knowledge that describes the West's representation and understanding of certain cultures outside of itself. At one point, that meant Middle Eastern cultures, but as colonial powers moved further east, it grew to include India and eastern Asia as well. The colonial aspect of the definition is an important one because, as he points out, description and political power went hand in hand in this period. Taking his cue from Michel Foucault's work, Said sees knowledge as a form of power: the power to classify, organize, and speak authoritatively about the Other.

While most of Orientalism is concerned with its modern expressions (from the late 18th century onwards), he acknowledges that orientalism has a longer history. You can find traces of it in classical Greek depictions of Persians and in mediaeval Christian (mis)understandings of Islam. It's that longer history that interests me as a world-builder, because it means that what we're dealing with when we approach the problem of orientalism in fantasy novels or games is roughly twenty-five hundred years of misrepresentation and stereotypes.

A 2500-year habit isn't easy to get over, which is why I'd like to list some features of orientalist representations: they're things to look out for in your own creations.

One of the points that Said makes is that the Orient was constructed in such a way as to make it the opposite of how Europeans saw themselves. It was as much a form of self-definition as a description of other cultures, and served to underscore the idea that 'they' were not like 'us.' The specific features ascribed to Europe and the Orient varied with time, and are scattered through Said's book, but to summarize them, they look something like this:

The West is rational, democratic/egalitarian, individualistic, progressive, faithful, hard-working, disciplined, honourable, masculine, and 'normal.'


The Orient is irrational, despotic, tribal, stagnant, fanatical, lazy, hedonistic, deceptive, feminine/childlike, and 'unnatural.'

A few of these features are worth unpacking further. Take, for example the democratic vs. despotic and individualistic vs. tribal pairings: both of these are ways of denying identity to non-Westerners, either by declaring that they are naturally inclined to follow strong leaders en masse, or that they exist only as nameless groups. If you're creating a setting and fill in a large area of the map with a horde of culturally identical enemies for your heroes to defeat, you're perpetuating this part of the orientalist problem. (Actually, I'd say that even if you find yourself starting to use the word 'horde' a lot, you might want to think about it.)

The progressive vs. stagnant pairing is a little more complex. It involves the assumption that only the West undergoes historical development, and that other cultures would remain the same indefinitely without outside intervention. This one can, in some cases, be presented in a seemingly more positive light by describing a culture as 'eternal,' but the end result is the same.

The religious components of orientalism can be equally complex. On the one hand, cultures may be perceived as fanatical or superstitious, lacking in the structured moral theologies of the West. On the other, they can be treated as spiritually superior, having preserved a mythic innocence that Westerners pursue to fill the void of their own religious lives. The relationship between the two perspectives can tangle, as was the case with 19th-century Theosophists who travelled east to embrace Buddhism: the version that they found didn't match the one that they'd read about through Western translations, so they reinvented it to suit their needs. (This particular problem is not, by the way, limited to 'Oriental' cultures: North Americans who seek wisdom in indigenous religions are guilty of the same sort of fantasy.) If you're creating a setting that involves a politically weak, but spiritually enlightened, culture, you may be embracing this stereotype.

A few final words, not directly connected to Said: there's a habit that I've noticed in fantasy, especially, to assume a kind of racial essentialism. The basic version of this is to assume that any culture that exists south of the equator will necessarily produce a society that resembles Egypt, sub-Saharan Africa, or South America. One of the issues that is, I think, at the heart of the call for diversity in Dungeons & Dragons is the need to recognize that this is a false assumption. Cultures aren't simply the products of their latitude. They're created by their histories, and when you introduce fantastical elements, those histories are going to change from their real-world counterparts. To ignore that fact isn't just lazy world-building; it contributes to a view of the world that says that no culture could be anything other than what it is, and that race is the determining factor.

That's something that we can all move beyond.