Post-Colonial Literature (E-C-305-C)

Name: kalani jalpa h.

Paper: Post-Colonial Literature (E-C-305-C)

Year: 2010-11

Semester: 3

Topic: Orientalism -By Edward Said

Orientalism- by Edward Said

ü  Orientalism is a book published in 1978 by Edward Said that has been highly influential and controversial in postcolonial studies and other fields. In the book, Said effectively redefined the term "Orientalism" to mean a constellation of false assumptions underlying Western attitudes toward the Middle East. This body of scholarship is marked by a "subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture."^[1] He argued that a long tradition of romanticized images of Asia and the Middle East in Western culture had served as an implicit justification for European and the American colonial and imperial ambitions. Just as fiercely, he denounced the practice of Arab elites who internalized the US and British orientalists' ideas of Arabic culture.

ü  So far as the United States seems to be concerned, it is only a slight overstatement to say that Muslims and Arabs are essentially seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists. Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab-Moslem life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Arab world. What we have instead is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world presented in such a way as to make that world vulnerable to military aggression.

ü  Orientalism was written to show European American power over the orient and the mystification of “the other.” Argument put forth by said is contained in the analytical method he puts forth for the reader. Namely the classic bias oriental view is the result of an academic bias necessitated by western colonial and post-colonial politics. The oriental is portrayed as a static “other.” Creating a culture that is an object looking humanism. The western goal was to justify colonial politics, economics and hegemony over the centuries. Michel Foucault’s ideas- power of knowledge is important. British are able to rule acquire so much knowledge. Institutionalized study, Orientalism is common anthology and is also stereotype knowledge that is “true” is not political; rather it is based on one’s experience. Knowledge is something that must be gained. Said is a Palestinian Exile. Said writes a professor of English and comparative literature of Columbia University. He is a western oriental. His grasp of history is broad and impressive in its scope as it relates it his analysis. Orientalism is designed to challenge the bias imbedded in the western conscious. The orient was for centuries, based upon on intellectual construct that reinforced conditions of inequality. Said successfully argues the nature of cross cultural discourse needs to be reexamined. The orient that Said places in front of the reader is of “cultures, traditions, and societies” polarized by a western power agenda. Cultural growth is denied the orient with progress claimed and administrated by the Occident.

ü  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"

ü  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"

ü  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 post-colonial works that share various degrees of skepticism about representation itself.

ü  A central idea of Orientalism is that Western knowledge about the East is not generated from facts or reality, but from preconceived archetypes that envision all "Eastern" societies as fundamentally similar to one another, and fundamentally dissimilar to "Western" societies. This discourse establishes "the East" as antithetical to "the West". Such Eastern knowledge is constructed with literary texts and historical records that often are of limited understanding of the facts of life in the Middle East.

ü  Following the ideas of Michel Foucault, Said emphasized the relationship between power and knowledge in scholarly and popular thinking, in particular regarding European views of the Islamic Arab world. Said argued that Orient and Occident worked as oppositional terms, so that the "Orient" was constructed as a negative inversion of Western culture. The work of another thinker, Antonio Gramsci, was also important in shaping Edward Said's analysis in this area. In particular, Said can be seen to have been influenced by Gramsci's notion of hegemony in understanding the pervasiveness of Orientalist constructs and representations in Western scholarship and reporting, and their relation to the exercise of power over the "Orient.”

ü  Many scholars now use Said's work to attempt to overturn long-held, often taken-for-granted Western ideological biases regarding non-Westerners in scholarly thought. Some post-colonial scholars would even say that the West's idea of itself was constructed largely by saying what others were not. If "Europe" evolved out of "Christendom" as the "not-Byzantium," early modern Europe in the late 16th century (see Battle of Lepanto (1571)) defined itself as the "not-Turkey."

ü  Said puts forward several definitions of "Orientalism" in the introduction to Orientalism. Some of these have been more widely quoted and influential than others:

1)     "A way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient's special place in European Western experience."

2)     "a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between the Orient' and (most of the time) 'the Occident'."

3)     "A Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient."

4)     "...particularly valuable as a sign of European-Atlantic power over the Orient than it is as a verdict discourse about the Orient."

5)     "A distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts."

ü  In his Preface to the 2003 edition of Orientalism, Said also warned against the "falsely unifying rubrics that invent collective identities," citing such terms as "America," "The West," and "Islam," which were leading to what he felt was a manufactured "clash of civilizations."

ü  The orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences. Now it was disappearing; in a sense it had happened, its time was over. Perhaps it seemed irrelevant that Orientals themselves had something at stake in the process, that even in the time of Chateaubriand and Nerval Orientals had lived there, and that now it was they who were suffering; the main thing for the European visitor was a European representation of the orient and its contemporary fate, both of which had a privileged communal significance for the journalist and his French readers.

ü  The orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture. 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. Compared with Oriental studies or area studies, it is true that the term Orientalism I less preferred by specialists today, both because it is too vague and general and because it connotes the high-handed executive attitude of nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century European colonialism. Nevertheless books are written and congresses held with “the Orient” as their main focus, with the Orientalist in his new or old guise as their main authority. Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the orient” and “the Occident.” I have found it useful here to employ Michel Foucault’s notion of a discourse, as described by him in The Archaeology of knowledge and in Discipline and punish, to identify Orientalism. From the beginning of the nineteenth century until the end of World War 2 France and Britain dominated the Orient and Orientalism; since World War 2 America has dominated the orient, and approaches it as France and Britain once enormously productive even if it always demonstrates the comparatively greater strength of the Occident, comes the large body of texts I call Orientalist. I have begun with the assumption that the orient is not an inert fact of nature. It is not merely there, just as the Occident itself is not just there either.

ü  Having said that, one must go on to state a number of reasonable qualifications. In the first place, it would be wrong to conclude that the Orient was essentially an idea, or a creation with no corresponding reality. A second qualification is that ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be understood or studied configurations of power, also being studied. To believe that the orient was created-or, as I call it, “Orientalized”- and to believe that such thing happen simply as a necessity of the imaginations, is to be disingenuous. The relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of dominations, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony, and is quite accurately indicated in the title of K. M. Panikkar’s classic Asia and Western Dominance.” The Orient was Orientalized not only because it was discovered to be “Oriental” in all those ways considered common west exercised power.

ü  This brings us to third qualification. One ought never to assume that the structure of Orientalism is nothing more than a structure of lies or of myths which, were the truth about them to be told would simply blow away. I myself believe that Orientalism is more particularly valuable as a sign of European-Atlantic power over the orient than it is as a verdic discourse about the Orient.