Occidentalism refers to and identifies representations of the Western world in two ways: as dehumanizing stereotypes of the Western world, ; and as ideological representations of the West, as applied in the works: Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post-Mao China, by Chen Xiaomei; Occidentalism: Images of the West, by James G. Carrier; and Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of its Enemies, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit. Occidentalism is often a counterpart to the term orientalism as used by Edward Said in his book of that title, which refers to and identifies Western stereotypes of the Eastern world, the Orient.
Occidental representations
In China "Traditions Regarding Western Countries" became a regular part of the Twenty-Four Histories from the 5th century CE, when commentary about The West concentrated upon on an area that did not extend farther than Syria. The extension of European imperialism in the 18th and 19th centuries established, represented, and defined the existence of an "Eastern world" and of a "Western world". Western stereotypes appear in works of Indian, Chinese and Japanese art of those times. At the same time, Western influence in politics, culture, economics and science came to be constructed through an imaginative geography of West and East.
Occidentalism debated
In Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of its Enemies, Buruma and Margalit said that nationalist and nativist resistance to the West replicates Eastern-world responses against the socio-economic forces of modernization, which originated in Western culture, among utopianradicals and conservative nationalists who viewed capitalism, liberalism, and secularism as forces destructive of their societies and cultures. While the early responses to the West were a genuine encounter between alien cultures, many of the later manifestations of Occidentalism betray the influence of Western ideas upon Eastern intellectuals, such as the supremacy of the nation-state, the Romantic rejection of rationality, and the spiritual impoverishment of the citizenry of liberal democracies. Buruma and Margalit trace that resistance to German Romanticism and to the debates, between the Westernisers and the Slavophiles in 19th-century Russia, and show that like arguments appear in the ideologies of Zionism, Maoism, Islamism, and Imperial Japanese nationalism. Nonetheless, Alastair Bonnett rejects the analyses of Buruma and Margalit as Eurocentric, and said that the field of Occidentalism emerged from the interconnection of Eastern and Western intellectual traditions.
