Two things share the name. The older sense is a Western tradition of depicting the Middle East and Asia — above all a lush 19th-century painting genre (Delacroix, Gérôme) of harems, bazaars, and deserts, vivid and often imaginary. In 1978 Edward Said published a book of the same title recasting the word as critique: a Western discourse of power portraying the East as exotic and irrational to justify imperial domination. Said's book founded postcolonial studies and drew serious counter-criticism from scholars including Robert Irwin and John MacKenzie. The word now means both the art and the charge.
In 1814 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres painted a nude woman from behind, reclining in a Turkish harem, her spine stretched an extra vertebra or two beyond anatomy, a peacock fan in her hand. He had never been to Turkey. Many such painters had traveled in the region, but the most charged scenes — above all the harem — showed private rooms no European man could enter, built from props, travel accounts, and fantasy. The harems, the slave markets, the languid odalisques and turbaned despots were assembled from travelers' tales, classical texts, and pure invention, and they sold magnificently across 19th-century Europe. For a century and a half this gorgeous genre was simply called Orientalism. Then, in 1978, a Palestinian-American scholar named Edward Said took the word and turned it into an accusation. The pictures, he argued, were never innocent. The dreamy, backward, sensual 'East' that Europe painted and studied was a fantasy built to flatter the West as rational and modern, and to help justify ruling the real places it claimed to depict. Said's book became one of the most cited works in the modern humanities. It was also attacked, by serious scholars, as a brilliant overstatement. The argument it started has not ended, and the word now means both the beautiful thing and the charge against it.