The publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978 dramatically altered the nature of literary and sociocultural scholarship. The book drew together and amplified the arguments of what had been until then a variety of disparate critiques of the hegemonic culture of “the West” (including the works of feminist, Marxist, post-structuralist, and anti-colonial writers). But it also made people more aware of the highly contingent nature of such categories as “the West” and “the East” (or the “Orient”) in the first place – and of the ways in which such categories must be actively produced by scholars, artists, poets, and historians, rather than being taken for granted as natural or inevitable essences.