Edward Said's signature contribution to academic
life is the book Orientalism. It has been influential in about half
a dozen established disciplines, especially literary studies (English,
comparative literature), history, anthropology, sociology, area studies
(especially middle east studies), and comparative religion. However, as big
as Orientalism was to academia, Said’s thoughts on literature
and art continued to evolve over time, and were encapsulated in Culture
and Imperialism (1993), a book which appeared nearly 15 years
after Orientalism (1978). Put highly reductively, the
development of his thought can be understood as follows: Said’s early work
began with a gesture of refusal and rejection, and ended with a kind of
ambivalent acceptance. If Orientalism questioned a pattern of
misrepresentation of the non-western world, Culture and
Imperialism explored with a less confrontational tone the complex and
ongoing relationships between east and west, colonizer and colonized, white and
black, and metropolitan and colonial societies.
Said directly challenged what Euro-American
scholars traditionally referred to as Orientalism. Orientalism is an entrenched
structure of thought, a pattern of making certain generalizations about the
part of the world known as the 'East'. As Said puts it:
“Orientalism was
ultimately a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the
difference between the familiar (Europe, West, "us") and the strange
(the Orient, the East, "them").”
Just
to be clear, Said didn't invent the term 'Orientalism'; it was a term used
especially by middle east specialists, Arabists, as well as many who studied
both East Asia and the Indian subcontinent. The vastness alone of the part of
the world that European and American scholars thought of as the
"East" should, one imagines, have caused some one to think twice. But
for the most part, that self-criticism didn’t happen, and Said argues that the
failure there –- the blind spot of orientalist thinking –- is a structural one.
The
stereotypes assigned to Oriental cultures and "Orientals" as
individuals are pretty specific: Orientals are despotic and clannish. They are
despotic when placed in positions of power, and sly and obsequious when in
subservient positions. Orientals, so the stereotype goes, are impossible to
trust. They are capable of sophisticated abstractions, but not of concrete,
practical organization or rigorous, detail-oriented analysis. Their men are
sexually incontinent, while their women are locked up behind bars. Orientals
are, by definition, strange. The best summary of the Orientalist mindset would
probably be: “East is east and west is west, and never the twain shall meet”
(Rudyard Kipling).
In
his book, Said asks: but where is this sly, devious, despotic, mystical
Oriental? Has anyone ever met anyone who meets this description in all
particulars? In fact, this idea of the Oriental is a particular kind of myth
produced by European thought, especially in and after the 18th century. In some
sense his book Orientalism aims to dismantle this myth, but
more than that Said's goal is to identify Orientalism as a discourse.
From
Myth to Discourse. The oriental is a
myth or a stereotype, but Said shows that the myth had, over the course of two
centuries of European thought, come to be thought of as a kind of systematic
knowledge about the East. Because the myth masqueraded as fact, the
results of studies into eastern cultures and literature were often
self-fulfilling. It was accepted as a common fact that Asians, Arabs, and
Indians were mystical religious devotees incapable of rigorous rationality. It
is unsurprising, therefore that so many early European studies into, for
instance, Persian poetry, discovered nothing more or less than the terms of
their inquiry were able to allow: mystical religious devotion and an absence of
rationality.
Political
Dominance. Said showed that the
myth of the Oriental was possible because of European political dominance of
the Middle East and Asia. In this aspect of his thought he was strongly
influenced by the French philosopher Michel Foucault. The influence from
Foucault is wide-ranging and thorough, but it is perhaps most pronounced when
Said argues that Orientalism is a full-fledged discourse, not just a simple
idea, and when he suggests that all knowledge is produced in situations of
unequal relations of power. In short, a person who dominates another is the
only one in a position to write a book about it, to establish it, to define it.
It’s not a particular moral failing that the stereotypical failing defined as
Orientalism emerged in western thinking, and not somewhere else.
Post-colonial
Criticism
Orientalism was a book about a particular pattern in western
thought. It was not, in and of itself, an evaluation of the importance of that
thought. It was written before the peak of the academic ‘culture wars’, when
key words like relativism, pluralism, and multiculturalism would be the order
of the day. Said has often been lumped in with relativists and pluralists, but
in fact he doesn’t belong there
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