Latineos - Latin America, Caribbean, arts, culture

The idea that vision is superior to the other senses would explain the commonly held assumption that humans learn better through images, and that ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’. When a new technology that reproduced what the eyes see started to be developed in the nineteenth century, its impact was felt in distinct areas such as art, the social sciences and psychology.

At least ever since Edward Said wrote Orientalism (1978), it has come to be commonly accepted that texts can create knowledge and that, over time, this knowledge produces discourses. Culture works through consent and this author suggests that European culture produced the Orient, through the accounts of travellers and colonizers, and through literature, by penetrating people’s imaginations with a certain representation of the oriental.