Orientalism (book)


Orientalism is a 1978 book by Edward W. Said, in which the author established "Orientalism" as a concept to describe the West's depiction and portrayal of "The East" in a contemptuous manner through the years. These societies and peoples are those who inhabit the places of Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East. Said argued that Orientalism, in the sense of the Western scholarship about the Eastern World, is inextricably tied to the imperialist societies who produced it, which makes much Orientalist work inherently political and servile to power.
According to Said, in the Middle East, the social, economic, and cultural practices of the ruling Arab elites indicate they are imperial satraps who have internalized a romanticized version of Arab Culture created by French, British and later, American Orientalists. Examples used include critical analyses of the colonial literature of Joseph Conrad, which conflates a people, a time, and a place into one narrative of an incident and adventure in an exotic land.
Through the critical application of post-structuralism in its scholarship, Orientalism influenced the development of literary theory, cultural criticism, and the field of Middle Eastern studies, especially with regards to how academics practice their intellectual inquiries when examining, describing and explaining the Middle East. The scope of Said's scholarship established Orientalism as a foundational text in the field of post-colonial studies, by denoting and examining the connotations of Orientalism, and the history of a given country's post-colonial period.
As a public intellectual, Edward Said debated historians and scholars of area studies, notably, the historian Bernard Lewis, who described the thesis of Orientalism as "anti-Western". For subsequent editions of Orientalism, Said wrote an Afterword and a Preface addressing discussions of the book as cultural criticism.

Overview

is the exaggeration of difference, the presumption of Western superiority, and the application of clichéd analytical models for perceiving the Oriental world.Orientalism #cite note-8| As such, Orientalism is the pivotal source of the inaccurate cultural representations that form the foundations of Western thought and perception of the Eastern world, specifically in relation to the Middle East region.
The word ‘Orientalism’ refers to at least three separate but interrelated meanings: 1) an academic tradition or field; 2) a worldview, representation, and “style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between "the Orient" and as a powerful political instrument of domination.
The principal characteristic of Orientalism is a "subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arab-Islamic peoples and their culture", which derives from Western images of what is Oriental that reduce the Orient to the fictional essences of "Oriental peoples" and "the places of the Orient"; such cultural representations dominate the communications of Western peoples with and about non-Western peoples.Orientalism #cite note-9|
These cultural representations usually depict the ‘Orient’ as primitive, irrational, violent, despotic, fanatic, and essentially inferior to the westerner or native informant, and hence, ‘enlightenment’ can only occur when “traditional” and “reactionary” values are replaced by “contemporary” and “progressive” ideas that are either western or western-influenced.

Cultural background

In practice, the imperial and colonial enterprises of the West are facilitated by collaborating régimes of Europeanized Arab élites who have internalized the fictional, and romanticized representations of Arabic culture. The idea of the "Orient" was conceptualized by French and English Orientalists during the eighteenth century, and was eventually adopted in the twentieth century by American Orientalists. As such, Orientalist stereotypes of the cultures of the Eastern world have served, and continue to serve, as implicit justifications for the colonial ambitions and the imperial endeavors of the U.S. and the European powers. In that vein, about contemporary Orientalist stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims, said:

Thesis of Representation

Orientalism proposes that much of the Western study of Islamic civilization was an exercise in political intellectualism; a psychological exercise in the self-affirmation of "European identity"; not an objective exercise of intellectual enquiry and the academic study of Eastern cultures. Therefore, Orientalism was a method of practical and cultural discrimination that was applied to non-European societies and peoples in order to establish European imperial domination. In justification of empire, the Orientalist claims to know more—essential and definitive knowledge—about the Orient than do the Orientals. Western writings about the Orient, the perceptions of the East presented in Orientalism, cannot be taken at face value, because they are cultural representations based upon fictional, Western images of the Orient. The history of European colonial rule and political domination of Eastern civilizations, distorts the intellectual objectivity of even the most knowledgeable, well-meaning, and culturally sympathetic Western Orientalist; thus did the term "Orientalism" become a pejorative word regarding non–Western peoples and cultures:
The notion of cultural representations as a means for domination and control would remain a central feature of Said's critical approach proposed in Orientalism. Towards the end of his life for instance, Said argued that while representations are essential for the function of human life and societies – as essential as language itself – what must cease are representations that are authoritatively repressive, because they do not provide any real possibilities for those being represented to intervene in this process.
The alternative to an exclusionary representational system for Said would be one that is “participatory and collaborative, non-coercive, rather than imposed”, yet he recognised the extreme difficulty involved in bringing about such an alternative. Difficult because advances in the “electronic transfer of images” is increasing media concentration in the hands of powerful, transnational conglomerates. This concentration is of such great magnitude that ‘dependent societies’ situated outside of the “central metropolitan zones” are greatly reliant upon these systems of representation for information about themselves - otherwise known as self-knowledge. For Said, this process of gaining self-knowledge by peripheral societies is insidious, because the system upon which they rely is presented as natural and real, such that it becomes practically unassailable.

Occidental and Oriental origins

Said said that the Western world sought to dominate the Eastern world for more than 2,000 years, since Classical antiquity, the time of the play The Persians, by Aeschylus, which celebrates a Greek victory against the Persians in the course of the Persian Wars —imperial conflict between the Greek West and the Persian East. Europe's long, military domination of Asia made unreliable most Western texts about the Eastern world, because of the implicit cultural bias that permeates most Orientalism, which was not recognized by most Western scholars.
In the course of empire, after the physical-and-political conquest, there followed the intellectual conquest of a people, whereby Western scholars appropriated for themselves the interpretation and translation of Oriental languages, and the critical study of the cultures and histories of the Oriental world. In that way, by using Orientalism as the intellectual norm for cultural judgement, Europeans wrote the history of Asia, and invented the "exotic East" and the "inscrutable Orient", which are cultural representations of peoples and things considered inferior to the peoples and things of the West.

The Other

Orientalism concluded that "Western knowledge of the Eastern world", i.e. Orientalism fictionally depicts the Orient as an irrational, psychologically weak, and feminized, non-European Other, which is negatively contrasted with the rational, psychologically strong, and masculine West. Such a binary relation, in a hierarchy of weakness and strength, derives from the European psychological need to create a difference of cultural inequality, between West and East, which inequality is attributable to "immutable cultural essences" inherent to Oriental peoples and things.
The notion of an Orient has played a central role in constructing European culture, and “helped to define Europe as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience”. The binary relationship of strong-West-and-weak-East reinforces the cultural stereotypes invented with literary, cultural, and historical texts that are more fictitious than factual; yet, which give the reader of Orientalist texts a limited understanding of life in the Middle East, because Orientalism conflates the different societies of the Eastern world, into the homogeneous world of "the Orient".

Geopolitics and cultural hierarchy

The contemporary, historical impact of Orientalism was in explaining the How? and the Why? of imperial impotence; in the 1970s, to journalists, academics, and Orientalists, the Yom Kippur war and the OPEC petroleum embargo were recent modern history. The Western world had been surprised, by the pro-active and decisive actions of non-Western peoples, whom the ideology of Orientalism had defined as essentially weak societies and impotent countries. The geopolitical reality of their actions, of military and economic warfare, voided the fictional nature of Orientalist representations, attitudes, and opinions about the non-Western Other self.

The academy

Moving from the assertion that ‘pure knowledge’ is simply not possible, Said sought to explain the connection between ideology and literature. He argued that “Orientalism is not a mere political subject or field that is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions”, but rather “a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts”. European literature for Said carried, actualised, and propelled Orientalist notions forward and constantly reinforced them. Put differently, literature produced by Europeans made possible the domination of the people of the ‘East’ because of the Orientalist discourse embedded within these texts. Literature here is understood as a kind of carrier and distributor of ideology.

Influence

The greatest intellectual impact of Orientalism was upon the fields of literary theory, cultural studies, and human geography, by way of which originated the field of Post-colonial studies. Edward Said's method of post-structuralist analysis derived from the analytic techniques of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault; and the perspectives to Orientalism presented by Abdul Latif Tibawi, Anouar Abdel-Malek, Maxime Rodinson, and Richard William Southern.

Post-colonial culture studies

As a work of cultural criticism, Orientalism is the foundation document in the field of Post-colonialism, and it provided a framework and method of analysis to answer the How? and the Why? of the cultural representations of "Orientals", "The Orient", and "The Eastern world" as presented in the mass communications media of the Western world.
Post-colonial theory studies the power and the continued dominance of Western ways of intellectual enquiry and the production of knowledge in the academic, intellectual, and cultural spheres of the de-colonised country. Said's survey concentrated upon the British and the French varieties of Orientalism that supported the British Empire and the French Empire as commercial enterprises constructed from colonialism, and gave perfunctory coverage, discussion, and analyses of German Orientalist scholarship.
Such disproportional investigation provoked criticism from opponents and embarrassment for supporters of Said, who, in "Orientalism Reconsidered", said that no one opponent provided a rationale, by which limited coverage of German Orientalism limits either the scholarly value or the practical application of Orientalism as a cultural study. In the Afterword to the 1995 edition of Orientalism, Said presented follow-up refutations of the criticisms that the Orientalist and historian Bernard Lewis made against the book's first edition.

Literary criticism

In the fields of literary criticism and of cultural studies, the notable Indian scholars of post-colonialism were Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak whose essay Can the Subaltern Speak? also became a foundational text of Post-colonial culture studies; Homi K. Bhabha ; Ronald Inden ; Gyan Prakash ; Nicholas Dirks ; and Hamid Dabashi.
In White Mythologies: Writing History and the West, Robert J. C. Young reported Post-colonial explanations of the "How?" and the "Why?" of the nature of the post-colonial world, the peoples, and their discontents; which verify the efficacy of the critical method applied in Orientalism, especially in the field of Middle Eastern studies.
In the late 1970s, the survey range of Orientalism did not include the genre of Orientalist painting or any other visual arts, despite the book-cover featuring a detail-image of The Snake Charmer, a popular, 19th-century Orientalist painting—to which the writer Linda Nochlin applied Said's method of critical analysis "with uneven results". In the field of epistemological studies, Orientalism is an extended application of methods of critical analysis developed by the philosopher Michel Foucault. The anthropologist Talal Asad said that the book Orientalism is:
The historian Gyan Prakash said that Orientalism 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" about the Orient; without colonial imperialism, there would be no Orientalism.

Oriental Europe

In Eastern Europe, Milica Bakić-Hayden developed the concept of Nesting Orientalisms, based upon and derived from the work of the historian Larry Wolff, and the ideas Edward Said presented in Orientalism.
The Bulgarian historian Maria Todorova presented her ethnologic concept of Nesting Balkanisms, which is thematically extended and theoretically derived from Milica Bakić-Hayden's Nesting Orientalisms.
Moreover, in "A Stereotype, Wrapped in a Cliché, Inside a Caricature: Russian Foreign Policy and Orientalism", James D. J. Brown said that Western stereotypes of Russia, Russianness, and things Russian are cultural representations derived from the literature of "Russian studies", which is a field of enquiry little afflicted with the misconceptions of Russia-as-the-Other, but does display the characteristics of Orientalism—the exaggeration of difference, the presumption of Western cultural superiority, and the application of cliché in analytical models. That overcoming such intellectual malaise requires that area scholars choose to break their "mind-forg'd manacles" and deeply reflect upon the basic cultural assumptions of their area-studies scholarship.

Criticism

Orientalism proved intellectually, professionally, and personally controversial. The thesis, content, substance, and style were much criticised by Orientalist academics, such as Albert Hourani, Robert Graham Irwin, Nikki Keddie , and Bernard Lewis.
In a review of a book by Ibn Warraq, American classicist Bruce Thornton dismissed Orientalism as an "incoherent amalgam of dubious postmodern theory, sentimental Third Worldism, glaring historical errors, and Western guilt". Likewise, in the preface paragraphs of a book-review article "Enough Said", about Dangerous Knowledge'', by Robert Irwin, Martin Kramer criticized what he said was the way Said's turned the term 'Orientalism' into a pejorative, saying "In a semantic sleight of hand, Said appropriated the term "Orientalism", as a label for the ideological prejudice he described, thereby, neatly implicating the scholars who called themselves Orientalists."
Nonetheless, the literary critic Paul De Man said that, as a literary critic, "Said took a step further than any other modern scholar of his time, something I dare not do. I remain in the safety of rhetorical analysis, where criticism is the second-best thing I do."

History

In the book review, "The Mightier Pen? Edward Said and the Double Standards of Inside-out Colonialism: a review of Culture and Imperialism, by Edward Said", Ernest Gellner said that Said's contention of Western domination of the Eastern world for more than 2,000 years was unsupportable, because, until the late 17th century, the Ottoman Empire was a realistic military, cultural, and religious threat to Europe.
In "Disraeli as an Orientalist: The Polemical Errors of Edward Said", Mark Proudman noted incorrect 19th-century history in Orientalism, that the geographic extent of the British Empire was not from Egypt to India in the 1880s, because the Ottoman Empire and the Persian Empire in that time intervened between those poles of empire. Moreover, at the zenith of the imperial era, European colonial power in the Eastern world never was absolute, it was relative and much dependent upon local collaborators — princes, rajahs, and warlords—who nonetheless often subverted the imperial and hegemonic aims of the colonialist power.
In For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies, Robert Irwin said that Said's concentrating the scope of Orientalism to the Middle East, especially Palestine and Egypt, was a mistake, because the Mandate of Palestine and British Egypt only were under direct European control for a short time, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; thus are poor examples for Said's theory of Western cultural imperialism. That Orientalism should have concentrated upon good examples of imperialism and cultural hegemony, such as the British Raj of India and Russia's dominions in Asia, but he did not, because, as a public intellectual, Edward Said was more interested in making political points about the politics of the Middle East, in general, and of Palestine, in particular. Moreover, that by unduly concentrating on British and French Orientalism, Said ignored the domination of 19th century Oriental studies by German and Hungarian academics and intellectuals, whose countries did not possess an Eastern empire. Irwin's book was later criticized by Amir Taheri, writing in Asharq Al-Awsat, when he listed a number of factual and editing errors that Irwin makes in the book, also noting a number of prominent Orientalists left unmentioned.
American scholar of religion Jason Ānanda Josephson has argued that data from Japan complicates Said's thesis about Orientalism as a field linked to imperial power. Not only did Europeans study Japan without any hope of colonizing it, but Japanese academics played a prominent role as informants and interlocutors in this academic discipline, providing information both on their own practices and history and on the history of China. Moreover, Josephson has documented that European conferences on East Asia predate European conferences on the Middle East described by Said, necessitating an alternative chronology of Western academic interest in the Orient.

Professional

In the article "Said's Splash", Martin Kramer said that, fifteen years after publication of Orientalism, the UCLA historian Nikki Keddie who originally had praised Orientalism as an 'important, and, in many ways, positive' book, had changed her mind. In Approaches to the History of the Middle East, Keddie criticised Said's work on Orientalism, for the unfortunate consequences upon her profession as an historian:

Literature

In the article, "Edward Said's Shadowy Legacy", Robert Irwin said that Said ineffectively distinguished among writers of different centuries and genres of Orientalist literature. That the disparate examples, such as the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe who never travelled to the Orient; the French novelist Gustave Flaubert who briefly toured Egypt; the French Orientalist Ernest Renan, whose anti-Semitism voided his work; and the British Arabist Edward William Lane, who compiled the Arabic–English Lexicon —did not constitute a comprehensive scope of investigation or critical comparison. In that vein, in Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism, Ibn Warraq earlier had said that in Orientalism Said had constructed a binary-opposite representation, a fictional European stereotype that would counter-weigh the Oriental stereotype. Being European is the only common trait among such a temporally and stylistically disparate group of literary Orientalists.

Philosophy

In The Asiatic Society of Bengal and the Discovery of India's Past O.P. Kejariwal said that with the creation of a monolithic Occidentalism to oppose the Orientalism of Western discourse with the Eastern world, Said had failed to distinguish, between the paradigms of Romanticism and the Enlightenment, and ignored the differences among Orientalists; and that he failed to acknowledge the positive contributions of Orientalists who sought kinship, between the worlds of the East and the West, rather than to create an artificial "difference" of cultural inferiority and superiority; such a man was William Jones, the British philologist–lexicographer who proposed that Indo–European languages are interrelated.
In the essay The Debate About 'Orientalism', Harry Oldmeadow said "that Said’s treatment of Orientalism, particularly the assertion of the necessary nexus with imperialism, is over-stated and unbalanced." He objected to Said's view that Western Orientalists were projecting upon the "artificial screen called “the East” or “the Orient”, but that such projection was only a small part of the relationship. That Said failed to adequately distinguish between the genuine experiences of the Orient and the cultural projections of Westerners. He further criticized Said for using reductionist models of religion and spirituality, that are based on "Marxist/Foucauldian/psychoanalytic thought".
George Landlow argued that Said assumed that such projection and its harmful consequences are a purely Western phenomenon, when in reality all societies do this to each other. This was a particular issue given Said treated Western colonialism as unique, which Landlow regarded as unsatisfactory for a work of serious scholarship.

Personality

In the sociological article, "Review: Who is Afraid of Edward Said?" Biswamoy Pati said that in making ethnicity and cultural background the tests of moral authority and intellectual objectivity in studying the Oriental world, Said drew attention to his personal identity as a Palestinian and as a subaltern of the British Empire, in the Near East. Therefore, from the perspective of the Orientalist academic, Said's personal background might, arguably, exclude him from writing about the Oriental world, hindered by an upper-class birth, an Anglophone upbringing, a British-school education in Cairo, residency in the U.S., a university-professor job; and categorical statements, such as: "any and all representations... are embedded, first, in the language, and then, in the culture, institutions, and political ambience of the representer... interwoven with a great many other things, besides 'the Truth', which is, itself, a representation."
Hence, in the article "Orients and Occidents: Colonial Discourse Theory and the Historiography of the British Empire", D.A. Washbrook said that Said and his academic cohort indulge in excessive cultural relativism, which intellectual excess traps them in a "web of solipsism", which limits conversation exclusively to "cultural representations" and to denying the existence of objective truth. That Said and his followers fail to distinguish between the types and degrees of Orientalism represented by the news media and popular culture, and heavy academic Orientalism about the language and literature, history and culture of the peoples of the Eastern world.
In the article "Orientalism Now", the historian Gyan Prakash said that Edward Said had explored fields of Orientalism already surveyed by his predecessors and contemporaries, such as V. G. Kiernan, Bernard S. Cohn, and Anwar Abdel Malek, who also had studied, reported, and interpreted the social relationship that makes the practice of imperialism intellectually, psychologically, and ethically feasible; that is, the relationship between European imperial rule and European representations of the non-European Other self, the colonised people. That, as an academic investigator, Said already had been preceded in the critical analysis of the production of Orientalist knowledge and about Western methods of Orientalist scholarship, because, in the 18th century, "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". Nonetheless, George Landow, of Brown University, who criticized Said's scholarship and contested his conclusions, acknowledged that Orientalism is a major work of cultural criticism.

Posthumous

In October 2003, one month after the death of Edward W. Said, the Lebanese newspaper Daily Star recognized the intellectual import of the book, saying "Said's critics agree with his admirers that he has single-handedly effected a revolution in Middle Eastern studies in the U.S." and that "U.S. Middle Eastern Studies were taken over, by Edward Said's postcolonial studies paradigm".

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