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How did Edward Said’s Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism draw attention to colonialism in literature?

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Antique book open to the frontispiece of The Iliad of Homer, showing the title and an engraved portrait of a bearded man, with old books in the background. — literature *The Iliad*, an epic of the Trojan War attributed to the ancient Greek poet Homer, is considered a foundational work of Western literature.

Edward Said’s influential works, Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993), fundamentally reshaped how scholars analyze the relationship between literature and colonialism.

In Orientalism, Said argued that Western scholarship and literature concerning the "Orient"—specifically the Arab and Islamic worlds—projected a biased, stereotyped vision of "otherness". He demonstrated that these cultural representations were not neutral; rather, they functioned as a mechanism to facilitate and support Western colonial policy by framing non-Western societies as inferior or in need of guidance. By exposing these tropes, Said highlighted how literature served as a tool for constructing an imperialist worldview.123

In Culture and Imperialism, Said expanded this critique to examine how the cultural products of Western empires, including the novel, were deeply intertwined with the history of colonial expansion. He argued that literature often helped normalize and justify the imperial project, making it essential to read these texts with an awareness of the power dynamics inherent in the colonial experience. Together, these works established a critical framework that remains central to postcolonial studies, emphasizing the ethical necessity of recognizing how narratives can perpetuate systems of domination.12