Ever since the publication of Edward Said's book Orientalism,1 studying Asia in the Western academy has become a contentious enterprise. This was not always the case. Asia has long figured quite comfortably as a generalized topic in the Western academy, and since the late-eighteenth-century it came under sustained scrutiny as a distinct field of investigation. Its place was cemented from that time as an academic discipline under the heading of Orientalism. Before Said, Orientalism simply referred to the knowledge of Asia produced by specialist scholars who bad mastered Asian languages. Like other fields in the modem academy, Orientalism was understood to be a form of 'disinterested' scholarship which aimed to compile verifiable knowledge about a particular object of inquiry, in this case the Orient. Orientalism's only conscious motivation seemed to be a vague sense that the history, geography, cultures, religions, and institutions of Asia were different from those of the West and that they ought to be documented and made available to the West.
The publication of Said's book effectively revoked this license. Said exposed the venerable Orientalism to the full force of the crisis of representation. The Orient, the long-standing object of inquiry for institutionalized Orientalism, was radically reconfigured as a result. Where it had always been understood to be present out there in some material sense, passively awaiting the scholar's benign and innocent gaze, Said revealed the Orient to be a representational chimera, a fantastical image projected from the Occident. He showed how long-standing and informal geopolitical knowledge of the Orient and its "basic geographical distinction" from the Occident, was disseminated "into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts". In these various discursive contexts, the distinction between Orient and Occident was elaborated representationally "by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description.2