5/16 Said/Shah

In Bidhi V. Shah’s article, “Laotian Daughters Working toward Community, Belonging, and Environmental Justice,” it focusses the main points on second generation Laotians and their self practices that are particularized by self understanding. There was a specific story that stuck out to me a lot because I could relate to the idea. A girl was talking about how she would get upset by the fact that her friends could confuse her Asian heritage with a different one by labeling her Chinese, Filipino, Vietnamese, etc. Then she should would rebuttal to her African-American peers by calling them Kenyans. Throughout my youth I was always called Japanese based on my looks without knowledge of me saying I was Taiwanese. People would always say “Are you Japanese” or “Oh, I thought you were Japanese.” Normally afterwards, I would be forced to correct their mistakes because it was instinct for me since it was happening so often. It never really bothered me, but when looking back, I can see how people will get upset by the idea of racial confusion and assumption.

In Edward Said’s film, Said elaborates on the ideas of Orientalism by going into more depth and analysis on the term. Said claimed that the first time he realized the concept of Orientalism was when he saw how Arabic people were depicted in novels. He then looks into how they are portrayed in Western media. This orientalism shown in media was essentially created by the US in which people took the negative stereotypes of a culture and portrayed them in everyday media. Thus, creates a spread of assumption based on what we see on the big screen and in books. Media perception of the orient is usually one trait that sticks out to people which in most cases tends to be negative. Orientalism is used as a term to oppose the west in which, gives cultures a bad name.