orientalist

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   historical or academic: a scholar of languages, literatures, histories, or cultures once grouped in Western scholarship as the Orient

   The nineteenth-century orientalist translated Persian poetry into English.

2. 2
   noun

   an artist or writer working in the Western tradition of depicting Asian or North African subjects

   The orientalist filled his canvases with imagined palace interiors and desert scenes.

3. 3
   adj

   relating to Orientalism, especially a Western portrayal that exoticizes or generalizes Eastern societies

   The museum revised labels that repeated orientalist assumptions about the region.

Formed from oriental + -ist. Oriental came through Middle French from Latin orientalis, from oriens, 'the rising sun, east,' the present participle of oriri, 'to rise.' The scholarly and artistic label reflects older European classifications of lands to the east; modern critical use is strongly shaped by debates about Orientalism.

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