THE COMMODIFICATION OF THE PHENOMENON OF ORIENTALISM AND ORIENTALISM AS A PROPAGANDIST DISCOURSE

Abstract

The notion orientalism, has been translated as “şarkiyatçılık” in Turkish. But we will not use this translation because of that it is a forced translation and refers to a place. The notion that is known with Edward Said, in general, identifies an opposition dualism according to Oliver Konty even if it is called as a scientific attempt or a discourse, ideology and hegemonic gun of the Occident. Of course our questioning is not to explain, identify or discuss what orientalism is. Therefore, here, we should imply what we will not foucs on than what we will focus on during this work. The aim of this work as mentioned above is not searching orientalism deeply or is not revealing discussions, reviews about orientalism or is not telling the whole story of orientalism. However, to explain our main course, how orientalism has evolved to a meta and how the commodification of orientalism affects dominant views ; we should give a short history of orientalism to see how the notion has changed and how this change creates different perspectives. And also, we should explain Said’s manifest and latent orientalism and as a different perpective, internalized orientalism. For this reason, by constructing this work under six subtitles, we will try to reach our conclusion. Here, our main question is how orientalism has evolved to a meta and how this evolution occurs in films and touristic places like Spice and Grand Bazaar. However, this transformation has a close relationship with the latent, manifest and internalized orientalism approaches. Especially, concentrating on the question of “what is the reaction of Oriental societies against Occident’s discourse?”, the answer was given on the basis of internatlized orientalism because it results in that orientalism become a meta.