Orientalism (book)

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Orientalism
Author Edward Said
Country United States
Language English
Subject(s) Postcolonial studies
Genre(s) Non-fiction
Publisher Vintage Books
Publication date 1978
Media type Print (Paperback)
ISBN ISBN 0-394-74067-X
Edward Said
Edward Said

Orientalism is the 1978 book by Edward Said that has been highly influential in postcolonial studies.

Contents

[edit] Overview

In Orientalism, Edward Saïd says that all discourse, especially cultural discourse, is inherently ideological, therefore, regardless of the subject, historical discourse occurs in a given ideological structure. Orientalism, especially the academic study of, and discourse, political and literary, about the Arabs, Islam, and the Middle East that primarily originated in England, France, and then the United States actually creates (rather than examines or describes) a divide between the East and the West. The book's examples, situate the West as culturally superior the East. This "Western superiority" became politically useful, when France and Britain conquered and colonised "Eastern" countries such as Egypt, India, Algeria and others.

The discourse surrounding these countries is coded, Said says, by a superiority that is not necessarily reflected in the realities of the concerned countries. When people in the West attempt to study the East they typically do so within this already coded discourse. Therefore, Said says, the study of someplace called the "Orient" and of some people known as "Arabs" fails to take into account the reality of the area as being the same place as the West (i.e., part of the Earth). Other countries and other people are not seen as the same within Oriental discourse, however, and therefore a study of these "others" must inherently be one of studying an inferior culture when Oriental discourse is used to describe them.

[edit] Summary

Said summarized his work in these terms:

"My contention is that Orientalism is fundamentally a political doctrine willed over the Orient because the Orient was weaker than the West, which elided the Orient’s difference with its weakness. . . . As a cultural apparatus Orientalism is all aggression, activity, judgment, will-to-truth, and knowledge" (Orientalism, p. 204).

Said also wrote:

"My whole point about this system is not that it is a misrepresentation of some Oriental essence — in which I do not for a moment believe — but that it operates as representations usually do, for a purpose, according to a tendency, in a specific historical, intellectual, and even economic setting" (p. 273).

Principally a study of 19th-century literary discourse and strongly influenced by the work of thinkers like Chomsky, Foucault and Gramsci, Said's work also engages contemporary realities and has clear political implications as well. Orientalism is often classed with postmodernist and postcolonial works that share various degrees of skepticism about representation itself (although a few months before he died, Said said he considers the book to be in the tradition of "humanistic critique" and the Enlightenment).

The book is divided into three chapters:

  • The Scope of Orientalism
  • Orientalist Structures and Restructures
  • Orientalism Now

[edit] Chapter 1: The Scope of Orientalism

In this section Said outlines his argument with several caveats as to how it may be flawed. He states that it fails to include Russian Orientalism and explicitly excludes German Orientalism, which he suggests had "clean" pasts (Said 1978: 2&4), and could be promising future studies. Said also suggests that not all academic discourse in the West has to be Orientalist in its intent but much of it is. He also suggests that all cultures have a view of other cultures that may be exotic and harmless to some extent, but it is not this view that he argues against and when this view is taken by a militarily and economically dominant culture against another it can lead to disastrous results.

Said draws on written and spoken historical commentary by such Western figures as Arthur James Balfour, Napoleon, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Byron, Henry Kissinger, Dante and others who all portray the "East" as being both "other" and "inferior."

He also draws on several European studies of the region by Orientalists including the Bibliotheque Orientale by French author Barthélemy d'Herbelot de Molainville to illustrate the depth of Orientalist discourse in European society and in their academic, literary and political interiors.

One apt representation Said gives is a poem by Victor Hugo titled "Lui" written for Napoleon:

By the Nile I find him once again.

Egypt shines with the fires of his dawn;

His imperial orb rises in the Orient.

Victor, enthusiast, bursting with achievements,
Prodigious, he stunned the land of prodigies.
The old sheikhs venerated the young and prudent emir.
The people dreaded his unprecedented arms;
Sublime, he appeared to the dazzled tribes
Like a Mahomet of the Occident. (Orientalism pg. 83)

[edit] Chapter 2: Orientalist Structures and Restructures

In this chapter Said outlines how Orientalist discourse was transferred from country to country and from political leader to author. He suggests that this discourse was set up as a foundation for all (or most all) further study and discourse of the Orient by the Occident.

He states that: "The four elements I have described - expansion, historical confrontation, sympathy, classification - are the currents in eighteenth-century thought on whose presence the specific intellectual and institutional structures of modern Orientalism depend” (120).

Drawing heavily on 19th century European exploration by such historical figures as Sir Richard Francis Burton and Chateaubriand, Said suggests that this new discourse about the Orient was situated within the old one. Authors and scholars such as Edward William Lane, who spent only two to three years in Egypt but came back with an entire book about them (Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians) which was widely circulated and read as truth throughout Europe, including by people like Burton who in turn based their studies on all previous Western studies.

Further travelers and academics of the East depended on this discourse for their own education, and so the Orientalist discourse of the West over the East was passed down through European writers and politicians (and therefore through all Europe).

[edit] Chapter 3: Orientalism Now

This chapter outlines where Orientalism has gone since the historical framework Said outlined in previous chapters. The book was written in 1978 and so only covers historical occurrences that happened up to that date. Said suggests that the discovery of oil in the Arabian Peninsula and the shift in regional power interests from Britain and France to the United States were important events that shaped and reshaped Orientalist ideas.

Said suggests that the colonial mentality of the British and French perceptions of the East shaped much of the United States' view of the region as well.

In this chapter Said also suggests that notions of the Orient were retranslated by people from the region who had gone to the West to study. So for example a Saudi college student studying in the US might return to Saudi Arabia with a retranslated notion about himself that is situated within Western Orientalist discourse.

It is in this chapter that Said makes his overall statement about cultural discourse: "How does one represent other cultures? What is another culture? Is the notion of a distinct culture (or race, or religion, or civilization) a useful one, or does it always get involved either in self-congratulation (when one discusses one's own) or hostility and aggression (when one discusses the 'other')?" (325).

While there is much criticism centered on Said's book, the author himself repeatedly admits his study's shortcomings both in this chapter, chapter 1 and in his introduction.

[edit] Influence

Orientalism is certainly Edward Said's most influential work and has been translated into at least 36 languages. It has been the focus of any number of controversies and polemics, notably with Bernard Lewis, whose work is critiqued in the book's final section, entitled "Orientalism Now: The Latest Phase." In October 2003, one month after Said died, a commentator wrote in a Lebanese newspaper that through Orientalism "Said's critics agree with his admirers that he has single-handedly effected a revolution in Middle Eastern studies in the U.S." He cited a critic who claimed since the publication of Orientalism "U.S. Middle Eastern Studies were taken over by Edward Said's postcolonial studies paradigm" (Daily Star, October 20, 2003). Even those who contest its conclusions and criticize its scholarship, like George P. Landow of Brown University, call it "a major work."[1]

However, Orientalism was not the first to produce criticism of Western knowledge of the Orient and of Western scholarship: "Abd-al-Rahman al Jabarti, the Egyptian chronicler and a witness to Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, for example, had no doubt that the expedition was as much an epistemological as military conquest."[2] Even in recent times (1963, 1969 & 1987) the writings and research of V.G. Kiernan, Bernard S. Cohn and Anwar Abdel Malek traced the relations between European rule and representations.[3]

Nevertheless, Orientalism is a detailed and influential work within the study of Orientalism because, as Talal Asad argued, it is “not only a catalogue of Western prejudices about and misrepresentations of Arabs and Muslims”[4], but more so an investigation and analysis of the "authoritative structure of Orientalist discourse – the closed, self-evident, self-confirming character of that distinctive discourse which is reproduced again and again through scholarly texts, travelogues, literary works of imagination, and the obiter dicta of public men [and women] of affairs."[5] Indeed, the book describes how "the hallowed image of the Orientalist as an austere figure unconcerned with the world and immersed in the mystery of foreign scripts and languages has acquired a dark hue as the murky business of ruling other peoples now forms the essential and enabling background of his or her scholarship."[6]

[edit] Criticism

In his book Dangerous Knowledge, British historian Robert Irwin criticizes Said's thesis that throughout Europe’s history, “every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.” Irwin points out that long before notions like third-worldism and post-colonialism entered the academia, many Orientalists were committed advocates for Arab and Islamic political causes.

Goldziher backed the Urabi revolt against foreign control of Egypt. The Cambridge Iranologist Edward Granville Browne became a one-man lobby for Persian liberty during Iran’s constitutional revolution in the early 20th century. Prince Leone Caetani, an Italian Islamicist, opposed his country’s occupation of Libya, for which he was denounced as a “Turk.” And Massignon may have been the first Frenchman to take up the Palestinian Arab cause. [7]

While acknowledging the great influence of Orientalism on postcolonial theory since its publication in 1978, George P. Landow - a professor of English and Art History at Brown University in the United States - finds Said's scholarship lacking. He chides Said for ignoring the non-Arab Asian countries, non-Western imperialism, the occidentalist ideas that abound in East towards the Western, and gender issues. Orientalism assumes that Western imperialism, Western psychological projection, "and its harmful political consequences are something that only the West does to the East rather than something all societies do to one another." Landow also finds Orientalism's political focus harmful to students of literature since it has led to the political study of literature at the expense of philological, literary, and rhetorical issues [8] (see also the article Edward Said.) Landow points out that Said completely ignores China, Japan, and South East Asia, in talking of "the East," but then goes on to criticise the West’s homogenisation of the East. Furthermore, Landow states that Said failed to capture the essence of the Middle East, not least by overlooking important works by Egyptian and Arabic scholars. In addition to poor knowledge about the history of European and non-European imperialism, another of Landow’s criticisms is that Said sees only the influence of the West on the East in colonialism. Landow argues that these influences were not simply one-way, but cross-cultural, and that Said fails to take into account other societies or factors within the East.

He also criticises Said’s "dramatic assertion that no European or American scholar could `know` the Orient." However, in his view what they have actually done constitutes acts of oppression [9]. Moreover, one of the principal claims made by Landow is that Said did not allow the views of other scholars to feature in his analysis; therefore, he committed “the greatest single scholarly sin” in Orientalism.[10]

In his criticism of Orientalism, author Ibn Warraq complains Said's belief that all truth was relative undermined his credibility

In response to critics who over the years have pointed to errors of fact and detail so mountainous as to destroy his thesis, [Said] finally admitted that he had "no interest in, much less capacity for, showing what the true Orient and Islam really are." [11]

Other critics discuss Said’s background when considering his point of view and his ability to give a balanced academic assessment of Orientalism. Edward Said was born in the British Mandate of Palestine to a wealthy family who sent him to the Anglican school of St George in Jerusalem then to Victoria College in Cairo which Said himself referred to as “designed by the British to bring up a generation of Arabs with natural ties to Britain”. After studying at Victoria College he went to live in America at the age of 15 and then went on to study at numerous academic institutions, and critics cite this as placing him outside the issues he writes about in his book. Edward Said had an exceptionally privileged upbringing from a financial perspective financed by his father whom Said described as “overbearing and uncommunicative” in his book “Out of Place” (1999). This upbringing would place Said in the “system” that forms much of the focus of his book and which depicts Orientalism as facilitator of British and French white man's burden in the Arab world.

Bernard Lewis, in his publication Islam and the West, highlights what he considers to be many historical and ethical errors and omissions from Said’s book and also highlights the political undertones, citing examples of imperialist administrators' publications being referenced as Orientalist academic work to portray Said’s hypotheses. Lewis also goes on to summarize why he feels that Said’s work is so popular.

“There is, as anyone who has browsed a college bookshop knows, a broad market for simplified versions of complex problems.”

Some of the points that Lewis cited in his criticism:

  • The isolation of Arabic studies from both their historical and philological contexts. (Said dates the main development of Arabic studies in Britain and France and dates them after the British French expansion)
  • Said's transmutation of events to fit his thesis (for example he claimed that Britain and France dominated the eastern Mediterranean from about the end of seventeenth century, knowing that at that time the British and French merchants and travelers could visit the Arab lands only by permission of the sultan). (p109)
  • Many leading figures of British and French Arabists and Islamists who are the ostensible subject of his study are not mentioned, such as Claude Cahen, Henri Corbin, Marius Canard.
  • Said's neglecting of Arab scholarship and other writings.

Lewis and other critics of Said’s work feel that omissions and inaccuracies are an attempt by the author to convey his “attitude” and feelings on Orientalism as academic study to underpin his personal beliefs and causes.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Edward W. Said's Orientalism
  2. ^ Prakash, G (Oct., 1995) “Orientalism Now” History and Theory, Vol. 34, No. 3, p 200.
  3. ^ Prakash, G (Oct., 1995) “Orientalism Now” History and Theory , Vol. 34, No. 3, p 200.
  4. ^ Asad, T (1980)English Historical Review p648
  5. ^ Asad, T (1980)English Historical Review p648
  6. ^ Prakash, G (Oct., 1995) “Orientalism Now” History and Theory , Vol. 34, No. 3, pp. 199-200.
  7. ^ Dangerous Knowledge by Robert IrwinMartin Kramer reviewing Dangerous Knowledge.
  8. ^ Landow, George P. Political Discourse — Theories of Colonialism and Postcolonialism. Edward W. Said's Orientalism
  9. ^ Edward W. Said's on Orientalist Scholarship
  10. ^ Landow, George P. Political Discourse — Theories of Colonialism and Postcolonialism. Edward W. Said's Orientalism
  11. ^ THE SINS OF EDWARD SAID By Ibn Warraq writersreps.com

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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