Discussion week 8

Please look at the pictures and illustrations at bottom and respond to both of the following two (2) questions (minimum 250 words).

3) Said says that, “The relationship between the Occident (the West) and the Orient (the East) is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony…” (highlighted on p. 49).”

How do you believe that the Picture #1 (at bottom) of a Singapore port might illustrate this, alongside Said’s thesis of Orientalism?
Now, look at Picture #2, which is taken by a Chinese photographer. How do you think this picture might have challenged Orientalist views of its time?

Note: I found Pictures #1 & 2 during archival research and limited information is available on them. Picture #1 includes no British or white people. The manual laborers (without shirts) are Chinese. The public officers (working for the British colonial government; in white dress) are likely Malay (who are native to the peninsula where Singapore is located). Picture #2 is a Chinese laborer in Singapore. (Links to an external site.)

4) Maryam Khalid states that: “[G]endered and orientalist identities, meanings, and images construct and organise the way we give meaning to and interpret our world, its people and events, and ‘the positions and possibiities for action within them’.” and then declares that “gendered narratives in the War on Terror have also relied on the (re)production of orientalist stereotypes.” Please provide (with brief explanation) two examples used by Maryam Khalid to support these statements.