Questão de Língua Portuguesa

01. Orientalism means several interdependent 02. things. The most readily accepted designation 03. for Orientalism is an academic one. Anyone 04. who teaches, writes about, or researches the 05. Orient, either in its specific or its general 06. aspects, is an Orientalist, and what he or she 07. does is Orientalism. 08. Related to this academic tradition is a 09. more general meaning for Orientalism as a 10. style of thought based ........ a distinction 11. made between ‘the Orient’ and ‘the Occident.’ 12. Thus a very large mass of writers and thinkers 13. have accepted the basic distinction between 14. East and West as the starting point for 15. elaborate theories, epics, novels, social 16. descriptions, and political accounts concerning 17. the Orient, its people, customs, ‘mind,’ 18. destiny, and so on. 19. The interchange between the academic 20. and the more or less imaginative meanings of 21. Orientalism is a constant one, and since the 22. late 18th century there has been a 23. considerable traffic between the two. Here I 24. come to the third meaning of Orientalism, 25. which is something more historically and 26. materially defined than either of the other 27. two. Orientalism can be discussed and 28. analyzed as the corporate institution for 29. dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by 30. making statements about it, authorizing views 31. of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it: in 32. short, Orientalism as a Western discourse for 33. dominating, restructuring, and having 34. authority ........ the Orient. 35. The Orient is not an inert fact of nature. It 36. is not merely there, just as the Occident itself 37. is not just there either. As both geographical 38. and cultural entities such regions as ‘Orient’ 39. and ‘Occident’ are man-made. Therefore as 40. much as the West itself, the Orient is an idea 41. that has a history and a tradition of thought, 42. UFRGS – CV/2015 – ING43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 53. imagery, and vocabulary that have given it 54. reality and presence in and for the West. The 55. two geographical entities thus support and to 56. an extent reflect each other. It would be 57. wrong to conclude that the Orient is 58. essentially an idea, or a creation with no 59. corresponding reality. There are cultures and nations whose location is in the East, and their lives, histories, and customs have a brute reality obviously greater than anything that could be said about them in the West. But the phenomenon of Orientalism as studied here deals principally, not with a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the internal consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient ........ or beyond any correspondence, or lack thereof, with a ‘real’ Orient. Adaptado de: SAID, Edward. Orientalism. In: Ashcroft, Bill et al. (ed.) The P ostcolonial Studies R eader. London/ New York: Routledge, 1995. p. 87-91.