@Walter Hinteler,
Sure, and we have the Institut des Langues Orientales, and the Italians have the Istituto Universitario Orientale in Napoli, etc. But these terms have been afixed to them centuries ago, at a time when there was a certain naivety about the central place of European culture in the world, and about Europe's responsibility to civilize the rest of the world.
Similarly, there has been a "Negro Improvement Association" in the US, a "négritude" movement in France, etc. It doesn't mean that the term "negro" has no negative connotations, just that people were either oblivious to them before, or didn't mind them too much.
If an Arab, a Chinese or a Japanese called himself an "occidentalist" and pretended to be a specialist of the "languages, cultures and civilizations of the west", I think quite a few of us would chuckle at his naivety.
About Edward Said's thesis on the subject:
Quote:Orientalism is a 1978 book by Edward W. Said, a critical study of the cultural representations that are the bases of Orientalism, the West's patronizing perceptions and fictional depictions of "The East" — the societies and peoples who inhabit the places of Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East. Orientalism, Western scholarship about the Eastern World, was and remains inextricably tied to the imperialist societies who produced it, which makes much Orientalist work inherently political and servile to power, and thus intellectually suspect.
