Sotiris Mitralexis warns us of the “dual Orientalization” in the realm of digital entertainment. Photo: COURTESY OF SOTIRIS MITRALEXIS

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Popular American livestreamer and internet celebrity IShowSpeed recently concluded a China tour, sparking intense discussions globally. Many commentators argue that through his unfiltered, real-time broadcasts, IShowSpeed offered international audiences a vivid and diverse portrait of contemporary China—while simultaneously challenging entrenched Western narratives rooted in “Orientalism.”

 

The concept of “Orientalism” was first systematically articulated by renowned literary critic Edward Said in his 1978 book Orientalism. According to Said, “Orientalism” refers to a prejudiced mode of thinking or epistemological framework through which the West expresses contempt for and fabricates distorted images of Eastern cultures. This mindset reinforces a binary opposition between East and West, casting the East as mysterious, backward, and authoritarian in order to legitimize Western cultural superiority and colonial domination. Such representations bear little resemblance to the actual conditions in Eastern societies. In the context of globalization and digitization, how are representations of “Orientalism” evolving? To explore this question, CSST interviewed Sotiris Mitralexis, a research fellow at the anthropology department of University College London. 

Persistent power dynamics 

CSST:  In the contemporary era, how has Orientalism evolved? 

Mitralexis: I originally come from a country, Greece, which is nominally independent and sovereign. Yet its public discourse is inundated with proclamations that “Greece belongs to the West” and that Greek governments should strive to “turn Greece into a properly European country,” while anthropologist Michael Herzfeld offers interesting angles to this by speaking of “crypto-colonialism” and applying it to Greece specifically, inter alia. These proclamations and geo-cultural identity wars are exceedingly impactful on the sphere of politics and policy, and were supremely weaponized during Greece’s government-debt crisis during the last decade in order to shape political decisions. Orientalism and self-Orientalization abound in the country, which is terrified at the very prospect of considering its position in a coming world without “colonies” of various kinds. 

While the classical discourse of Orientalism might have evolved in the current era, its underlying power dynamics and representational issues continue to manifest in various forms even within “the West.” It is true that quasi-colonial configurations are not living their brightest days, but they are still active and impactful, particularly in the cultural sphere. 

While during Edward Said’s times, one iteration of “the West” was still the dominant paradigm, with peoples and states striving to reclaim their own voices after historical colonialism proper vis-à-vis both an external and an internalized “West,” the era lying ahead of us is substantially different. The demographic, economic, technological, productive, political, geopolitical, and cultural ascendance of the Global South, with civilizational states as its main nodes, gradually engenders a multipolar world and reality in which it will simply make no sense to anxiously negotiate one’s own cultural and collectively political identity vis-à-vis “the West” in an Orientalist, self-Orientalizing, or post-colonial gesture anymore. 

Orientalism is, perhaps first and foremost, a form of power and control. Interestingly, there is a very different kind of “inverse Orientalism” that we see developing in “the West.” When Westerners look at the ascendance of the Global South and of civilizational states like China, they often fear that these new powers will inevitably aspire to an offensive and threatening form of global hegemony, because the situation is assessed by Westerners on the basis of the Anglo-Saxon precedents of the British Empire and of the United States. If Orientalism represents and depicts “non-Westerners” as alien, exotic, and profoundly different, here we see its inversion: “Westerners” simply not being able to fathom the very possibility that “non-Westerners” might be indeed different, that they might indeed not desire to exercise their new global status in the oppressive way characteristic of modern Anglo-American history, for the simple reason that deep and different civilizational paradigms and, as such, priorities are at play. 

CSST:  Homi Bhabha put forward the concept of hybridity to refer to the creation of new transcultural forms within the contact zone produced by colonization. In the context of globalization, is Orientalism being replaced by a new cultural hybridity that truly breaks the East-West antagonism or just masks the inequality of power? 

Mitralexis: Identities and cultural forms are in constant flux and redefinition, even if certain foundational civilizational characteristics remain discernible even over millennia. Usually, I like to focus on the umbilical cord connecting forms of Orientalism in cultural identity to global power dynamics, as the former depends on the latter like plants depend on water: should the latter change, the former will inevitably change as well, even after a certain amount of time. If I understand it correctly, the crux of your question concerns the “East-West antagonism.” If the beginning of education is the examination of names, as the classical Greeks would claim, then we could start by these very words, “East” and “West.” 

Here we return to the difference between actual geography and the ideas and narratives projected onto geography, e.g., as studied by critical geopolitics—for instance, “the Middle East” as a term simply betrays the position of the European, and British, observer, in contrast to the neutral geographical notion of “Western Asia.” It is “the West” itself that is perhaps the most malleable of these seemingly geographic, geo-cultural notions. What is “the West,” among all possible options on the table? Is this the Euro-Atlantic “West” of NATO? The European, post-NATO “West” without the US? The long-gone, back-then-soon-to-be globalized West of Fukuyama’s “End of History?” “The West” of Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations?” Historically, the European-Mediterranean historical “West” of the Roman Empire, the Western European Carolingian “West,” colonialism’s “West” in the modern era, the Cold War’s “West” of the “free world?” A scrutiny of the differing itineraries of notions such as “West” and “Occident” would be revealing here—and it is indeed difficult to use such wobbly terms as analytical tools in today’s era, particularly when one considers them as having a set and given semantic content. 

Whatever “the West” might be, however, one thing is for certain. A period of about two centuries is currently in the process of expiring, in which the gravitational center of global power (economic, political, cultural) was on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean—first with the British Empire, and then with the United States of America. If one zooms out and looks at history proper, this period was a historical aberration: the only time in history, spanning just two centuries, in which the gravitational epicenter of global economic, political, civilizational power was not in the Eurasian continent but on its periphery. In many ways, what is now swiftly returning is historical normalcy, rather than a wholly new era. These mighty shifts are destined to radically reshape cultural and identity processes in the decades to come. 

Essentially unchanged in information era 

CSST: With the rise of digital media and social networks, how has the discourse and dissemination of Orientalism evolved? 

Mitralexis: Orientalism, however defined, is premised on the dissemination of representations—and particularly on the dissemination of representations as natural and given. The medium itself—i.e., social networks and their viral dynamics, characterized by brevity, sensationalism, and visual dominance—privileges reductive imagery over nuanced cultural articulation, leading to the reconstitution of Orientalist tropes in novel yet fundamentally familiar guises. It is, therefore, not merely a question of whether digital media reinforce Orientalism, but rather how they recalibrate its modalities and extend its reach. 

Yet apart from the initial human, “manual” set-up of algorithm configuration, what further complicates the picture is their function as a self-fulfilling prophecy after their initial set-up, thus rendering their Orientalist discourse more pervasive, insidious, and resilient. Such algorithms are designed to maximize user engagement, often by reinforcing existing beliefs and preferences. This can lead to the amplification of Orientalist stereotypes, as users are more likely to engage with content that aligns with their preconceived notions—you inadvertently teach the algorithm to offer you more of what you would expect simply by engaging with it. Moreover, the opacity of these algorithms means that users are often unaware of how their perceptions are being shaped. The result is a more subtle but equally impactful form of Orientalism that is embedded in the very fabric of digital media. 

‘Dual Orientalization’ 

CSST:  What’s your opinion about Orientalist elements in virtual reality and online games? 

Mitralexis: A particularly salient arena in which Orientalist discourse finds fertile ground is that of virtual reality and online gaming. The realm of digital entertainment frequently constructs “the East” as an aestheticized spectacle. This is further compounded by the narrative structures of many games, which cast Eastern settings as the backdrop for Western protagonists or present East-West interactions within the well-worn frameworks of conquest, tutelage, or inscrutability. That these digital landscapes are consumed by global audiences—including those from the very cultures being depicted—further complicates the discourse, as players internalize representations that may bear little resemblance to lived realities. 

Returning to algorithms, what we have here is a dual Orientalization: one designed, consciously or inadvertently, by the algorithm’s actual human designers, and one further reinforced by the sheer mechanism of the algorithm as it progresses, due to the logic of algorithmic recommendation systems operating through engagement maximization, privileging content that aligns with pre-existing biases and user behavior. This discloses the purported nature of algorithms as ostensibly neutral arbiters of information as a foundational lie. 

This phenomenon of “technology-driven Orientalism” is marked by its subtlety, but also by its deep structural entrenchment. Unlike its 19th-century antecedents, which largely operated through explicit colonialist discourse, the contemporary iteration manifests in the seemingly innocuous recommendations of a search query, or the preferential ranking of particular images, or the selective suppression of actual “non-Western” narratives. The extent to which such technologies shape perceptions of the Global South for “Western” audiences is, therefore, not simply a question of content but of access—of what is surfaced, what is omitted, and what patterns of visibility are algorithmically inscribed into the digital landscape. 

Edited by LIU YUWEI