The premises of Balfour‘s speech demonstrate very clearly how knowledge and dominance go hand in hand: England knows Egypt; Egypt is what England knows; England knows that Egypt cannot have self-government; England confirms that by occupying Egypt; for the Egyptians, Egypt is what England has occupied and now governs; foreign occupation therefore becomes ̳the very basis‘ of contemporary Egyptian civilization. But to see Orientalism as simply a rationalization of colonial rule is to ignore the fact that colonialism was justified in advance by Orientalism (1978:39). They are treated as objects that can be scrutinised and understood, and this objectification is confirmed in the very term ‘Orient‘, which covers a geographical area and a range of populations many times larger and many times more diverse than Europe. Abaza, M. and Stauth, G. (1990) ‘Occidental reason, Orientalism, Islamic fundamentalism:A critique’, in Martin Albrow and Elizabeth King (eds) Globalization, Knowledge andSociety, London: Sage. This textual attitude extends to the present day, so that, if Arab Palestinians oppose Israeli settlement and occupation of their lands, then that is merely ‘the return of Islam,‘ or, as a renowned contemporary Orientalist defines it, Islamic opposition to non-Islamic peoples, a principle of Islam enshrined in the seventh century. (1982) ‘Orientalism: An exchange’, New York Review of Books 29(13): 46–8. Pathak, Z., Sengupta, S. and Purkayastha, S. (1991) ‘The prisonhouse of Orientalism’,Textual Practice 5(2): 195–218. The core of Said‘s argument resides in the link between knowledge and power, which is amply demonstrated by Prime Minister Arthur Balfour‘s defense of Britain‘s occupation of Egypt in 1910, when he declared that: ‘We know the civilization of Egypt better than we know any other country’ (1978:32). It requires the maintenance of rigid boundaries in order to differentiate between the Occident and the Orient. The term ‘Orientalism‘ is derived from ‘Orientalist‘, which has been associated traditionally with those engaged in the study of the Orient. This was nowhere better exemplified than in the rise of Oriental studies and the emergence of Western imperialism. Edward Said. Orientalismo (in inglese Orientalism) è un saggio pubblicato nel 1978 da Edward Said, che tentò di spiegare e ridefinire le modalità con cui l'Europa rappresenta, nella sua storia, l'"Oriente". die arabische Welt als einen „Stil der Herrschaft, Umstrukturierung und des Autoritätsbesitzes über den Orient“. To Said, the Orient and the Oriental are direct constructions of the various disciplines by which they are known by Europeans. (1978:27). Post was not sent - check your email addresses! (1981) ‘Orientalism and Orientalism in reverse’, Khamsin 8: 9–10. ‘Quite literally, the occupation gave birth to the entire modern experience of the Orient as interpreted from within the universe of discourse founded by Napoleon in Egypt‘ (1978:87). Rather, it is to suggest that the apparently morally neutral pursuit of knowledge is, in the colonialist context, deeply inflected with the ideological assumptions of imperialism. ——(1994a) Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution, Durham, NC:Duke University Press. The division of the world into East and West had been centuries in the making and expressed the fundamental binary division on which all dealing with the Orient was based. It is not only adjacent to Europe; ‘it is also the place of Europe‘s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other’ (1978:1). Edward Said. It is in the cultural sphere that the dominant hegemonic project of Orientalist studies, used to propagate the aims of imperialism, can be discerned. The political orientation of his analysis can be seen by the importance he gives to Napoleon‘s invasion of Egypt in 1798. This is precisely what occurs when the Orientalist text is held to signify, to represent the truth: the Orient is rendered silent and its reality is revealed by the Orientalist. Even powerful imaginative writers such as Gustav Flaubert, Gerard de Nerval or Sir Walter Scott were constrained in what they could either experience or say about the Orient. 3. Orientalism (1978), by the literary critic Edward Said, announced many of the themes of subaltern studies. To the Westerner, according to Said, the Oriental was always like some aspect of the West; to some German Romantics, for example, Indian religion was essentially an Oriental version of Germano-Christian pantheism. Hence, from an Orientalist perspective, the study of the Orient has been always from an Occidental or Western point of view. Thus, Orientalism, shares with magic and with mythology the self-containing, self-reinforcing character of a closed system, in which objects are what they are because they are what they are, for once, for all time, for ontological reasons that no empirical material can either dislodge or alter. With this assertion we come right to the heart of Orientalism, and consequently to the source of much of the controversy it has provoked. Such was the vigour of the discourse that myth, opinion, hearsay and prejudice generated by influential scholars quickly assumed the status of received truth. The idea that academic knowledge is ‘tinged‘, ‘impressed with‘, or ‘violated by‘ political and military force is not to suggest, as Dennis Porter supposes (1983), that the hegemonic effect of Orientalist discourse does not operate by ‘consent‘. Although it is generated within the society and cultures of the colonisers, it becomes that discourse within which the colonised may also come to see themselves (as, for example, when Africans adopt the imperial view of themselves as ‘intuitive‘ and ’emotional‘, asserting a distinctiveness from the ̳rational‘ and ‘unemotional‘ Europeans). Claims such as these show why Said‘s argument is so compelling, and why it caught the imagination of critics in the 1970s. Said‘s intervention is designed to illustrate the manner in which the representation of Europe‘s ‘others’ has been institutionalised since at least the eighteenth century as a feature of its cultural dominance. ——(1982a) ‘The question of Orientalism’, New York Review of Books 29(11): 49–56. The concept of Orientalism was coined by the late Edward Said, a Palestinian-American academic who founded the discipline of Postcolonial Studies. Why? More seriously, the ad hominem attacks on Said and his band of alleged Pied Pipers also make it more difficult to sustain an attack on the role of Orientalists in authorizing certain aspects not only of American military and security policy but those of Israel as well. Said, Edward (1977) Orientalism. Knowledge of the Orient, because it was generated out of this cultural strength, ‘in a sense creates the Orient, the Oriental and his world‘ (1978:40). Thus the elaborate and detailed examinations of Oriental languages, histories and cultures were carried out in a context in which the supremacy and importance of European civilisation was unquestioned. “Orientalism is a rethinking of what has been considered an impassable gulf between East and West for centuries. The dominance of the social sciences after the Second World War meant that the mantle of Orientalism was passed to the social sciences. Yet the Orientalist makes it his work to be always converting the Orient from something into something else: he does this for himself, for the sake of his culture. ‘[O]ne big division, as between West and Orient, leads to other smaller ones‘ (1978:58) and the experiences of writers, travellers, soldiers, statesmen, from Herodotus and Alexander the Great on, become ‘the lenses through which the Orient is experienced, and they shape the language, perception and form of the encounter between East and West‘ (1978:58). Said argues that this was to a large extent made possible by the ‘transference of a popular anti-Semitic animus from a Jewish to an Arab target…since the figure was essentially the same‘ (1978:286). Works cited Said points out that the upsurge in Orientalist study coincided with the period of unparalleled European expansion: from 1815 to 1914. Here, Said sets out to establish how the main philological, historical and creative writers in the nineteenth-century drew upon a tradition of knowledge that allowed them textually to construct and control the Orient. Since the Orientalist text offers a familiarity, even intimacy, with a distant and exotic reality, the texts themselves are accorded enormous status and accrue greater importance than the objects they seek to describe. The intellectual power of the book comes from its inspired and relentlessly focused analysis of the way in which a variety of disciplines operated within certain coherent discursive limits, but the cultural, and perhaps even emotional, power of the book comes from its ̳worldly‘ immediacy, its production by a writer whose identity has been constructed, in part, by this discourse, who still feels the effects of Orientalist ‘knowledge‘. Routledge, 2009. Bhatnagar, R. (1986) ‘Uses and limits of Foucault: A study of the theme of origins inEdward Said’s Orientalism’, Social Scientist (Trivandrum) 158: 3–22. Hence, Orientalism necessarily is viewed as being linked inextricably to colonialism. Ultimately, the power and unparalleled productive capacity of Orientalism came about because of an emphasis on textuality, a tendency to engage reality within the framework of knowledge gained from previously written texts. Orientalism is an openly political work. By means of this discourse, Said argues, Western cultural institutions are responsible for the creation of those ‘others‘, the Orientals, whose very difference from the Occident helps establish that binary opposition by which Europe‘s own identity can be established. How Said can claim to be an ‘Oriental‘ rehearses the recurrent paradox running through his work. Certainly the decision by Warren Hastings, Governor-General of India in the 1770s, to conduct the Indian court system on the basis of Sanskrit law paved the way for the discoveries of William Jones, who helped translate the Sanskrit. An integral part of Orientalism, of course, is the relationship of power between the Occident and the Orient, in which the balance is weighted heavily in favour of the former. Clifford, J. But Napoleon‘s tactics—persuading the Egyptian population that he was fighting on behalf of Islam rather than against it —utilizing as he did all the available knowledge of the Koran and Islamic society that could be mustered by French scholars, comprehensively demonstrated the strategic and tactical power of knowing. The issue of representation is crucial to understanding discourses within which knowledge is constructed, because it is questionable, says Said, whether a true representation is ever possible (1978:272). … Influenced by the imperialism and colonialism of the 19th century, Western people became interested in the natives and the cultures of Western colonies. Orientalism has a well-established meaning in English – namely, the scholarly study by Westerners of eastern cultures, languages and peoples, a meaning Edward Said sometimes adopts. This encoding and comparison of the Orient with the West ultimately ensures that the Oriental culture and perspective is viewed as a deviation, a perversion, and thus is accorded an inferior status. Following on from the notion of discourse we saw earlier (p. 14), colonial discourse is a system of statements that can be made about colonies and colonial peoples, about colonising powers and about the relationship between these two. Orientalism, then, in its different phases, is a Eurocentric discourse that constructs the ‘Orient‘ by the accumulated knowledge of generations of scholars and writers who are secure in the power of their ‘superior‘ wisdom. (Rudyard Kipling) Introduction: Edward Said’s book, Orientalism (first published in 1978), is consistent with the very obvious frustration expressed by both common and wise men of east, some western scholars, who believe that the west has … Orientalism is divided into three main parts. The key to Said‘s interest in this way of knowing Europe‘s others is that it effectively demonstrates the link between knowledge and power, for it ‘constructs‘ and dominates Orientals in the process of knowing them. Said argues that ‘such texts can create not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe‘ (1978:94). Lecturer in English PSC Solved Question Paper, Analysis of Thomas De Quincey’s On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth, Analysis of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. It worked this way because the intellectual accomplishments of Orientalist discourse served the interests, and were managed by the vast hierarchical web, of imperial power. ‘Knowledge‘ is always a matter of representation, and representation a process of giving concrete form to ideological concepts, of making certain signifiers stand for signifieds. (1988) ‘On Orientalism’, in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth CenturyEthnography, Literature and Art, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Imaginative geography legitimates a vocabulary, a representative discourse peculiar to the understanding of the Orient that becomes the way in which the Orient is known. Edward Said: A Critical Reader, Oxford: Blackwell. Edward Said‘s publication of Orientalism (1978) made such an impact on thinking about colonial discourse that for two decades it has continued to be the site of controversy, adulation and criticism. Orientalism thus becomes a form of ‘radical realism‘ by which an aspect of the Orient is fixed with a word or phrase ‘which then is considered either to have acquired, or more simply be, reality’ (1978:72). What holds these experiences together is the shared sense of something ‘other‘, which is named ‘the Orient‘. It occurs because the knowledge of ‘subject races‘ or ‘Orientals‘ makes their management easy and profitable; ‘knowledge gives power, more power requires more knowledge, and so on in an increasingly profitable dialectic of information and control‘ (1978:36). The book is a complex articulation of how the absorptive capacity of Orientalism has been able to adopt influences such as positivism, Marxism and Darwinism without altering its central tenets. The web of racism, cultural stereotypes, political imperialism, dehumanizing ideology holding in the Arab or the Muslim is very strong indeed, and it is this web which every Palestinian has come to feel as his uniquely punishing destiny…The nexus of knowledge and power creating ‘the oriental‘ and in a sense obliterating him as a human being is therefore not for me an exclusively academic matter. Hence, through this process, they are able to ‘Orientalise‘ the region. This construction and rendering visible of the Orient served the colonial administration that subsequently utilized this knowledge to establish a system of rule. Edward Said argued in his highly influential book Orientalism (1978) that western scholars were so contaminated by their European ideas and preconceptions that they could not deal honestly and fairly with Asian topics. Yet it is an intellectual matter of some very obvious importance. Lewis, B. The disciplines of modern Oriental studies, despite their sophistication, are inescapably imbued with the traditional representations of the nature of the Orient (especially the Middle East) and the assumptions that underlie the discourse of Orientalism. The way we come to understand that ‘other‘ named ‘the Orient‘ in this binary and stereotypical way can be elaborated in terms of the metaphor of theatre. The belief that representations such as those we find in books correspond to the real world amounts to what Said calls a ‘textual attitude‘. In this highly-acclaimed work, Edward Said surveys the history and nature of Western attitudes towards the East, considering orientalism as a powerful European ideological creation - a way for writers, philosophers and colonial administrators to deal with the 'otherness' of eastern culture, customs and beliefs. The power that underlies these representations cannot be divorced from the operations of political force, even though it is a different kind of power, more subtle, more penetrating and less visible. Closer inspection would reveal that much of the most intensive Oriental scholarship was carried out in countries such as Germany, which had few colonial possessions. Orientalism is 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 For Said, nowhere is this better reflected than in the manner in which these legacies are manifested in American foreign policy. Both for critics and accolades, the book Orientalism by Edward Said has been monumental. Wider analysis might also reveal that various styles of representation emerged within Orientalist fields. London: Penguin..... 1 Little, D. (1979) ‘Three Arabic critiques of Orientalism’, Muslim World 69(2): 118–21, 127,130. The point is that in each case the Oriental is contained and represented by dominating frameworks. Said‘s intervention is designed to illustrate the manner in which the representation of Europe‘s 'others' has been institutionalised since at least the eighteenth … Edward Said’s Orientalism is a treatise on the cultural construction that is Orientalism, which, far from merely an academic and scholarly discipline, is inextricably bound wit If I could I would make the entire world read this book, extremely relevant as its subject matter remains today. Debates About Identity Are important. The very term ‘the Orient‘ holds different meanings for different people. But the crucial fact was that Orientalism, in all its many tributaries, began to impose limits upon thought about the Orient. In Cromer‘s and Balfour‘s language, the Oriental is depicted as something one judges (as in a court of law), something one studies and depicts (as in a curriculum), something one disciplines (as in a school or prison), something one illustrates (as in a zoological manual). The Orient that Said discussed was basically the Middle East, and the Orientalism was the body of fact, opinion, and prejudice accumulated by western European scholars in their encounter… Read More Edward Said sebagai Orientalisme. The underpinning of such a demarcation is a line between the Orient and the Occident that is ̳less a fact of nature than it is a fact of human production‘ (Said1985:2). (1978:63), In this way certain images represent what is otherwise an impossibly diffuse entity (1978:68). “Orientalism is a rethinking of what has been considered an impassable gulf between East and West for centuries.
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