Introduction
His work is based upon his interpretation of the opposition of “imperial-colonial” which follows an almost archetypal pattern of antitheses such as North-South, majority-minority, male-female, intellectual-layman, and so on. Such oppositions have existed since the genesis of human society, but Said’s treatment of the relationship between Empire and colony is significantly different. Orientalists before Said and probably after him have built a body of more or less patterned activities which can be considered as the outcome of their age-old scholarship. Said, on the other hand, revolted against his colleagues, “debunking the great monuments of their own academic discipline.”
Crystallizing Orientalism in such a systematic way is like a revelation. On the one hand, knowledge from different fields of study such as history, sociology, philosophy and literature are widely deciphered; on the other, a great deal of responses resulted, whose effect was a conversion of Orientalism from a general “philological discipline” into “a social science specialty.”
A point of importance about Said’s character and writing is that he always remains generous in his judgments and conscientious and thorough even in small matters. He is punctiliously fair in his tone despite his sympathy for the plight of Palestinians. He is never overwhelmed by his analyses. His love for colonial writers such as Kipling, E. M. Forster, Conrad, and Flaubert remains undiminished despite the fact that he recognizes their complicity in the imperial project.
Edward Said is the most outstanding practitioner of Orientalism. His ideas on this topic have really been influential in different fields. He is present largely on the current cultural and literary stage. The influence of this American Palestinian intellectual and sophisticated critic is so great that the whole world is familiar with his ideas and commentaries on Western literature, art, cinema, music, history, society and politics. These are frequently cited in different forums and publications. More than anything else, Said holds sway over the criticism of the novel in the nineteenth century. His Culture and Imperialism (1993) is a critique not only of authors like Rudyard Kipling, E. M. Forster and Joseph Conrad who wrote openly about the West’s colonies, but also of a few quintessentially domestic writers such as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens whose novels Mansfield Park and Great Expectations respectively, are concerned with the colonial-imperial question.
Nevertheless, Edward Said made a big splash on the literary stage with the publication of Orientalism. After that, he achieved world renown as a writer. Orientalism is a critique of the academic field of Oriental Studies, which itself is a field of learning purveyed at the most prestigious universities of Europe for several centuries. This field of study is a broad and complex arena of scholarship; it incorporates different disciplines such as philology, linguistics, ethnography, and the interpretation of culture through the discovery, recovery, compilation, and translation of Oriental texts.
Defining Orientalism
In Orientalism, Edward Said discusses important issues. Firstly, he postulates that the scholarship fabricated by Orientalism fails to be objective and disinterested, despite its claim to be so. Actually, it advances the cause of Westerners to dominate the Orient geographically. Then, scientific geography should be distinguished from commercial geography. Said believes, “the connection between national pride in scientific and civilizational achievement and the fairly rudimentary profit motive was urged, to be channeled into support for colonial acquisition.” Secondly, Said believes that a society builds up its identity more efficiently by imagining an “other.” Orientalism helped the West to define itself. So the West became superior culturally and intellectually, while the East or the Orient was imagined and reflected as culturally static and inferior. So, according to Orientalism, Westerners and Orientals are in binary opposition of each other. Said quotes Cromer as saying “Orientals are inveterate liars, they are lethargic and suspicious, and in everything oppose the clarity, directness, and nobility of the Anglo-Saxon race.” Thirdly, a false and negative picture of the Orient and its culture is drawn by Orientalism. The Orient’s “sensuality,” “despotism,” “aberrant mentality,” “inaccuracy” and “backwardness” are all features of Said’s description of Orientalism.
He invests Orientalism with different meanings, which he claims to be interdependent. He presents his academic definition of Orientalism as follows:
Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient – and this applies whether the person is an anthropologist, sociologist, historian, or philologist – either in its specific or its general aspects, is an Orientalist, and what he or she does is Orientalism.
Another definition, which he calls imaginative, is a more general one:
Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the Orient” and (most of the time) “the Occident.” Thus a very large mass of writers, among whom are poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, “mind,” destiny, and so on.
Edward Said then gives a more comprehensive account of Orientalism, which invests the previous aspects with a historical and material meaning:
Taking the late eighteenth century as a very roughly defined starting point Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient – dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.
Edward Said then sees Orientalism as a discourse, a term used by Michael Foucault in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972) and in Discipline and Punish (1975), to understand the system built up by Europeans to create a new Orient in different spheres. His next definition is as follows:
Orientalism, therefore, is not an airy European fantasy about the Orient, but a created body of theory and practice in which, for many generations, there has been a considerable material investment.
Furthermore, Orientalism is referred to as “a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical and philological texts.” Another description calls Orientalism, “an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction but also of a whole series of interests which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, not only creates but also maintains.” Said’s Orientalism, above all, is:
a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with power political (as with a colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning sciences like comparative linguistics or anatomy, or any of the modern policy sciences), power cultural (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values), power moral (as with ideas about what “we” do and what “they” cannot do or understand as “we” do.
In this way the writer of Orientalism satisfies the reader’s curiosity by providing him / her with a range of different meanings to construct a readerly and comprehensive definition for this complex modern notion.
All in all, Orientalism is based on the distinction between the West and the East. Said postulates that Orientalism fundamentally becomes “a political vision of reality.” This structure is based on the dichotomy between the familiar
Misrepresentation and Resistance
A significant issue in Orientalism is its being a representation of the Orient. Representation, in this sense, is a sort of control. As Said argues, representation very often turns to misrepresentation. For instance, Islam has been fundamentally misrepresented in the West. Said ultimately decides that Orientalism overrode the true Orient and negated its truth. As far as Orientalism is concerned, the Orient cannot speak and it needs to be represented. Said quotes Marx’s statement: “They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.” This statement is used as an epigraph and quoted twice in Orientalism.
Thus “the real issue is whether there can be a true representation of anything.” To put it simply, is it possible to make true statements? There are two major traditions, one denying such a possibility while the other responds positively to this question. As for the first, Nietzsche believes that true representation is not possible, since the nature of human communication is to distort fact. On the other hand, the Marxists claim that true statements are possible. Said’s position is more intricate. He asserts that the line between representation and misrepresentation is always very thin. But he further contributes to this argument by concluding that the distinction between representation and misrepresentation is “at best a matter of degree” and that “we must be prepared, to accept the fact that a representation is eo ipso implicated, intertwined, embedded, interwoven with a great many other things besides the truth, which is itself a representation.” In general, Orientalism is a discourse of misrepresentation. So Said argues against the possibility of true representation, at least in regard to Orientalism. Misrepresentation is the key concept in this book.
Said’s Orientalism is divided into three main sections. The first section introduces the term while focusing on the wide and shapeless scope of Orientalism. Here Said raises the question of representation; he points out that different Western conceptions of the East such as Oriental despotism and Oriental sensuality are ultimately similar. In the second section, Said exposes “Orientalist Structures and Restructures.” He introduces some of the writers of the nineteenth century who exploited knowledge to re-construct and subjugate the Orient. This was of great help towards establishing colonial rule in the colonies. The third and last section examines “Modern Orientalism.” Said connects the traditional Orientalism of Britain and France on the one hand, to that of the
But it isn’t Said’s aim only to prove the ill intentions of Orientalism; he also attempts to talk about the need for an alternative for this kind of scholarship.
He recognizes that there are a lot of individual scholars engaged in producing such knowledge. Yet, he is concerned about the ‘guild tradition’ of Orientalism, which has the capacity to wear down most scholars. He urges continued vigilance in fighting the dominance of Orientalism.
Said’s own solution to the problem is to break with the prejudiced position of Orientalism and to adopt a “secular” desire to express the truth via questioning and protesting. So Said does not abandon the reader with mere questions in his book. He rises above that level by affording an answer. He invites us to be:
sensitive to what is involved in representation, in studying the other, in racial thinking, in unthinking and uncritical acceptance of authority and authoritative ideas, in the socio-political role of intellectuals, in the great value of skeptical critical consciousness.
It is unfair to accuse Said of inattention to resistance to the imperial problem; rather he offers practical and highly intellectual ways of resistance.
END
MNA
Your Comment