Between Worlds

Edward Said was a literary critic and a scholar of comparative literature, but the questions he raised extend far beyond these fields. My own work is primarily in media studies, and Said remains an important point of reference—not only because he wrote directly about the media, but because his approach helps us question how representations shape our understanding of the world.

As the anniversary of his death on September 24, 2003, approaches, I wanted to return to his life and ideas. The documentary Edward Said: Between Worlds, featured in the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival ↗ programme, provides another occasion to do so. I look forward to watching it when I have the opportunity. Its title also offers a useful starting point for thinking about Said’s intellectual position.

In this essay, I begin with Said’s life and the theoretical foundations of his work before considering how his ideas can inform our readings of advertising, television, and popular culture. Rather than concentrating on a single cultural text, I offer a broader framework and several examples, including some from Turkey. The aim is to explore a perspective that we can also bring to the representations we encounter in our own everyday lives.

Said was born in Jerusalem in 1935 into a Palestinian Arab Christian family with a Protestant background. His childhood was spent between Jerusalem and Cairo. He later moved to the United States, completing his undergraduate education at Princeton and his graduate studies at Harvard. In 1963, he joined Columbia University, where he would spend much of his career teaching English and comparative literature.

Viewed from one angle, this was a distinctly Western academic trajectory: an education at leading American universities, a long career at Columbia, and a profound knowledge of Western literature.

From another angle, however, Said was a Palestinian intellectual who became increasingly involved in the Palestinian struggle, particularly after 1967. He spoke publicly about displacement, dispossession, and the denial of Palestinian rights.

He was not an academic whose activities were confined to the university. He wrote for newspapers, gave interviews, participated in political debates, and addressed the Palestinian question openly in the United States.

This is what makes the phrase “between worlds” so suggestive. Said was Palestinian, Arab, and Christian, while also deeply embedded in American academic life. His work and life cannot easily be contained within a single national or cultural identity.

This sense of being out of place is especially prominent in his writings on exile and in his memoir, Out of Place. We might be tempted to describe this position through the language of hybridity. For Said, however, displacement, exile, and the difficulty of belonging are more immediately relevant. They describe not only a biographical experience but also a way of seeing.

When you cannot place yourself entirely within one identity, nation, or culture, you may become more attentive to the assumptions that hold these categories together. What others present as natural, normal, or unchanging can begin to look less self-evident.

I find this sensitivity throughout Said’s work. He attends not only to what is visible but also to what remains outside the picture; not only to what is said but also to what is left unsaid.

Representation Is Never Neutral

Said’s best-known book is Orientalism, published in 1978. It was followed by The Question of Palestine in 1979 and Covering Islam in 1981. Culture and Imperialism appeared in 1993, while Out of Place, published in 1999, offered a more personal account of his life and experiences of displacement.

One of the books I find particularly compelling is Covering Islam.

The word “covering” carries a revealing ambiguity. In journalism, to cover something means to report on it. But to cover also means to conceal or obscure.

The title therefore invites a question: when the media cover Islam, might they also cover something up? When societies with very different histories, cultures, and political conditions are placed under a single category called “Islam,” what becomes harder to see?

This brings us to one of Said’s central concerns. How does a Western subject turn the East into an object of discourse? How is it reported, narrated, painted, or photographed? We can extend these questions to advertisements, television dramas, and films.

Representation is never entirely neutral.

Every representation involves selection. Something enters the frame while something else remains outside it. A person is named, described, and interpreted through particular categories. Some characteristics become significant; others disappear.

Representation is therefore also a field of power.

Said’s particular concern was the relationship between East and West within this field. But before we proceed, we need to ask: where exactly is the East? And where is the West?

These are not simply geographical descriptions. For Said, they are also culturally and ideologically constructed categories.

“The West” can bring with it associations of modernity, progress, reason, science, and technology. “The East,” by contrast, may be associated with tradition, backwardness, irrationality, emotionality, exoticism, violence, or mysticism.

These associations do more than describe the East. They also help the West define itself.

I am modern because the other is traditional. I am rational because the other is irrational. I am advanced because the other is backward.

Representing the East in a particular way is thus part of the process through which the West produces an image of itself.

This does not necessarily mean that a group of people consciously decides to represent the East in a certain way so that it can be controlled. Said’s argument is much broader than an account of deliberate propaganda.

Over centuries, particular images of the East recur in scholarship, travel writing, novels, paintings, political speeches, and news reporting. Through repetition, they become established. Eventually, they help constitute what counts as knowledge about the East.

What Is Orientalism?

Orientalism examines the knowledge produced about the East across a wide range of Western texts and institutions. Said draws on literature, travel accounts, scholarship, philology, and political writing.

The book does not merely identify a series of inaccurate or offensive representations. It investigates a larger system of knowledge and representation.

In its introduction, Said distinguishes three connected meanings of Orientalism.

First, Orientalism refers to an academic field: the study of Eastern societies, languages, cultures, and histories. Historically, scholars working in these areas were called Orientalists.

Second, the term describes a broader style of thought based on a fundamental distinction between East and West. This is the logic behind statements that begin by assuming that “the East is like this” while “the West is like that.”

The third meaning is especially important. From the late eighteenth century onward, Orientalism increasingly operated as an institutional structure through which the East could be described, classified, taught, administered, and subjected to authority.

The distinction between East and West did not originate in the eighteenth century. Its history is much longer. What changed in the modern period was the extent to which knowledge about the East became institutionalized.

Universities, scholarly societies, language schools, museums, and research institutions participated in this process, alongside literature and the arts. Their activities did not exist independently of political developments.

Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt in 1798 offers a particularly revealing example. He did not arrive with soldiers alone. Scientists, surveyors, engineers, and other specialists accompanied the expedition.

Military intervention proceeded alongside measurement, mapping, classification, and description. A territory was entered by force while its history, landscape, and inhabitants became objects of systematic knowledge.

Knowledge and power developed together.

To govern a place, you seek to know it. But the knowledge you produce also shapes how you believe it should be governed.

As European colonialism expanded during the nineteenth century, this relationship became increasingly pronounced. French rule in North Africa, British rule in India, and later British occupation in Egypt were not only military and economic arrangements. They were also settings for extensive knowledge production.

Admiration Can Also Other

The cultural climate of nineteenth-century Europe mattered too. Romanticism, for example, helped make the East an attractive imaginative space for some writers and artists.

Romanticism should not be treated as the single origin of Orientalism. Nevertheless, certain Romantic representations imagined the East as a spiritual, mysterious, emotional, or exotic alternative to an increasingly industrialized and mechanized Europe.

This raises an important point: admiration does not necessarily prevent othering.

Orientalism need not take the simple form of declaring the East inferior and the West superior. You may find the East enchanting. You may admire its supposed spirituality, mystery, colours, or sensuality.

Yet if these qualities are presented as timeless and essential, living societies can still be reduced to a fixed image.

Orientalist painting makes this process particularly visible. Harems, bathhouses, odalisques, deserts, markets, exotic clothing, and sexualized female bodies turn the East into a source of visual pleasure.

Ingres’s imagined harem scenes, for example, show how an artist could construct such a world without travelling to the places it supposedly represented.

The East becomes not only another place but also another time.

The West moves forward, changes, and develops. The East appears to remain suspended in history.

Orientalism therefore produces a temporal distinction as well as a spatial one. The West inhabits the present, perhaps even the future, while the East is placed in the past.

As an “other” is created, a corresponding “self” takes shape.

Even geographical terms carry traces of this perspective. Consider the Middle East, the Near East, and the Far East. Middle in relation to what? Near to whom? Far from where?

These expressions presuppose a particular geographical centre.

Said’s concept of “imaginative geography” helps us understand this process. Physical places exist, but they also acquire cultural meanings through the distinctions we draw between familiar and unfamiliar spaces.

Imagine someone living in nineteenth-century Paris or London who had never visited Egypt, Ottoman territories, or India. How would that person know the East?

Through novels, travel accounts, paintings, and newspapers—and later through photographs, cinema, and other media.

These representations did not simply transmit an already known reality. They shaped what that reality could be understood to be.

Even today, people sometimes associate Turkey with camels, deserts, fezzes, or harems. They do not need to be personally hostile toward the country to reproduce these associations. Such images may simply constitute the Turkey they have encountered through representation.

Over time, these patterns can also influence how societies classified as Eastern understand and represent themselves.

Discourse, Knowledge, and Hegemony

Two thinkers are especially important for understanding Said’s theoretical approach: Michel Foucault and Antonio Gramsci.

Foucault’s concept of discourse is central here.

Discourse is not simply a collection of words. It concerns the wider organization of knowledge: what can be said about a subject, who is entitled to speak, and which statements count as true or legitimate.

From this perspective, knowledge and power cannot be completely separated.

Defining, classifying, and producing expertise about something can help establish authority over it.

Said asks us to approach knowledge about the East through these questions. Who produces it? In which institutions? Through what categories? Who is recognized as an expert? And how does this knowledge relate to political power?

This is why he approaches Orientalism as a discourse rather than merely a collection of individual prejudices.

Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony provides another important part of the framework.

A system of power does not endure through coercion alone. Certain values, ideas, and understandings of the world gradually become normal and familiar. They enter what a society treats as common sense.

People begin to feel that this is simply how the world is.

Consent matters because a particular worldview can become accepted as reasonable and self-evident.

Said draws on this insight to explain the cultural reach of Orientalism. Orientalism is not reducible to the prejudices of a few writers or colonial administrators. It operates across scholarship, art, literature, and politics, helping make particular distinctions between East and West appear natural.

Again, this is not a conspiracy theory.

It does not require people in London or Paris to gather around a table and agree on how the East should be represented. Rather, institutions, texts, individual practices, and historical interests intersect to produce a discursive order that gradually establishes its own authoritative truths.

Turning the Gaze Inward

These ideas also allow us to move beyond the question of how the West represents the East.

What interests me is how similar distinctions can operate within a society. In Turkey, for example, we can encounter forms of self-Orientalism: the reproduction of an Orientalizing gaze in representations of one’s own society.

Some scholarship traces aspects of this process to Ottoman modernization. During the nineteenth century, modernizing elites could represent certain populations and imperial peripheries as backward others in need of education and transformation.

Categories associated with the Western gaze could therefore be reproduced internally, although under different historical and political conditions.

This does not mean that Western colonial Orientalism can simply be copied and pasted onto the Turkish context. The point is that related hierarchies can reappear in different forms.

Within Turkey, references to “the East” can evoke tradition, distance, or underdevelopment, while “the West” can suggest urbanity, modernity, and progress.

Media and popular culture offer many opportunities to examine how these associations work.

Placing Others in a Different Time

One recurring pattern is the representation of places as bound to tradition or suspended outside contemporary time.

Consider Turkish television dramas organized around a konak: a large mansion that often serves as the home of an extended family and the centre of patriarchal authority. Series such as Asmalı Konak (The Mansion with the Vine), Sıla (Homecoming), and Hercai (Fickle Heart) provide examples of this narrative world.

These dramas are set in different parts of Anatolia, the peninsula that forms most of Turkey’s territory. Their representations of provincial life can draw on large families, clan relationships, customary obligations, and powerful patriarchs.

A character arriving from a major city may appear more individualistic, independent, and modern.

The contrast can make the province seem not only geographically distant but temporally removed. The urban centre occupies the present, while provincial life appears caught within tradition.

This does not mean that these series are identical or that every aspect of them should be labelled Orientalist. It means that we can identify and question a recurring pattern of representation.

Turning a City into an Exotic Image

A second pattern is exoticization.

Mardin, a city in southeastern Turkey known for its historic stone architecture, offers a useful example. Its narrow streets, old houses, passageways, and doorways provide striking settings for television dramas, advertisements, and fashion photography.

The problem is not that Mardin is beautiful or that its architecture is shown.

The question is what happens when the city becomes primarily an aesthetic surface.

The everyday lives of its inhabitants, social inequalities, ethnic and religious diversity, and historical conflicts can fall outside the frame. A complex city becomes a picturesque backdrop that communicates an “authentic East.”

What looks like appreciation may therefore coexist with a narrowing of what can be seen.

Making People Visible but Labour Invisible

A third pattern involves turning people into decorative signs.

Turkish tea advertisements frequently draw on the eastern Black Sea region, where much of the country’s tea is grown. Women picking tea appear in headscarves and regional clothing, sometimes speaking in local accents. Their smiles and gestures become signs of the product’s naturalness, warmth, and authenticity.

Yet the woman can be visible while her labour remains invisible.

We see the person harvesting the tea, but not necessarily her working conditions or the social relations of production.

She can become less a subject with a life of her own than a decorative figure whose role is to lend authenticity to a commodity.

The distinction is subtle but important. Visibility alone does not guarantee that someone is represented as a subject.

Eurovision and the Familiar Image of Turkey

Another example comes from Sertab Erener’s performance of “Everyway That I Can,” which won the Eurovision Song Contest for Turkey in 2003.

I was seventeen at the time. I watched the contest, celebrated the victory, and felt proud. I was not thinking about the ideological dimensions of the performance.

Returning to it years later, however, I began to find its visual language particularly interesting.

The song’s music video, and elements of its Eurovision presentation, draw on a recognizable repertoire of Ottoman harem imagery: sensuality, female dancers, and choreography that evokes Oriental dance.

The lyrics do not directly tell the story of a woman in a harem. Yet the visual presentation places the song within a world shaped by harem fantasies and an eroticized image of the East.

Some of the music video’s imagery also reminds me of Fernand Cormon’s painting The Deposed Favourite, which depicts the position of a displaced favourite within a harem. I am suggesting a visual association here, not claiming a documented direct influence.

The broader repertoire is familiar within Orientalist representation: women positioned around an unseen male authority, competition for attention, sensuality, and an exotic domestic space.

In this sense, elements of an image historically produced about Turkey are reproduced by Turkish cultural producers themselves.

This makes the performance open to a reading through self-Orientalism.

It would be misleading to conclude that Turkey won Eurovision because of this imagery. The song was successful, Erener was a powerful vocalist, and the performance was compelling.

My question concerns the representational strategy: did we offer European audiences an image of Turkey they already knew how to recognize? Did we present the Turkey they had become accustomed to seeing?

What interests me more is the possibility of interrupting that familiarity.

Of course, “the West” is not a homogeneous audience. Having discussed Said’s critique, it would be contradictory to treat it as one.

Nevertheless, when certain expectations about Turkey or the East circulate widely, we can ask whether a representation confirms them or makes room for something else.

Representation is not only a matter of introducing ourselves to others. It can also transform the categories through which others believe they know us.

Reading What Falls Outside the Frame

This brings us to another of Said’s important concepts: contrapuntal reading, developed in Culture and Imperialism.

The term comes from music. In counterpoint, distinct melodic lines unfold together. Listening to one does not require losing awareness of the others.

Said turns this into a way of reading.

His discussion of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park is a well-known example. The novel centres on an English country house, family relationships, and the social order surrounding them. Yet the material foundations of that world extend to colonial Antigua and its plantation economy.

England occupies the narrative foreground, while the colonial relations that help sustain its domestic order remain much less visible.

A contrapuntal reading holds these histories together. While reading about Mansfield Park, we also attend to Antigua.

The point is not to abandon the story at the centre. It is to read it alongside the histories and relationships that it places at the margins.

I find this approach especially useful for media criticism.

When we see a smiling woman in a tea advertisement, we can also consider her labour.

When we encounter a beautiful fashion photograph taken in Mardin, we can ask about the social life excluded from its frame.

When we watch a drama that presents provincial life as timeless, we can consider the contemporary lives and changing relationships that its narrative leaves out.

In each case, we try to attend to what is not shown while looking carefully at what is.

This is one of the most valuable reading practices Said offers us.

Looking Again

Said’s work provides more than a vocabulary for identifying stereotypes. It asks how representations become knowledge, how knowledge acquires authority, and how familiar distinctions come to appear natural.

His theoretical foundations are important precisely because the problem cannot be reduced to whether an individual image is flattering or offensive. An admiring image can still fix a society in place. A sympathetic portrayal can still deny someone a voice. A visible person can still have their labour and history obscured.

The examples discussed here are not intended as final judgments on particular dramas, advertisements, or performances. They are starting points for asking different questions.

Who has the authority to describe? From where is the world being viewed? Which histories sustain the scene before us? And whose presence has been turned into background?

Said invites us to take what we see seriously without allowing it to define the limits of what we can think. Looking again means recognizing that the frame is never the whole world.