The persistence of Orientalism in Middlebury Arabic language education
Orientalism has always been tied to Arabic and Middle Eastern studies in the Western world. While the Western study of Arabic dates to the 15th century, the language remained in the background of Western academia until the Enlightenment, which ignited interest in foreign cultures and established Arabic speakers as exotic, violent or backwards. “Orientalism” encapsulates these generalizations. It is the study of distorted western understandings and reproductions of the Arab-Islamic world; a “system of representations” that creates an Other and ensures the supremacy of the Western world. Academics eventually abandoned the term in the 1970s for more regionally-aware categorizations.