Orientalism Edward Said

"Orientalism"

The term orientalism denotes the exaggeration of difference, the presumption of Western superiority, and the application of clichéd analytical models for perceiving the "Oriental world". This intellectual tradition is the background for Said's presentation of Orientalism as a European viewpoint reflecting a contrived Manichean duality.

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.

Said distinguishes between at least three separate but interrelated meanings of the term:[6]: 2–3 

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 (most of the time) 'the Occident';" and
3. as a powerful political instrument of domination.

In other words, Said had in mind the "Occidental" (or Western) views of eastern cultures that mirrored the prejudices and ideologies that the colonial experience of Western individuals was shaded by. Said's work drew attention to the obsession of Western writers with women and their role in the preservation (or destruction) of so-called cultural mores, viewing them as either "pristine" (redeemed) or "contaminated" (fallen).[7]

According to an article published by The New Criterion, the principal characteristic of Orientalism is a "subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arab-Islamic peoples and their culture,"[8] which derives from Western images of what is Oriental (i.e., cultural representations) that reduce the Orient to the fictional essences of "Oriental peoples" and "the places of the Orient;" such representations dominate the discourse of Western peoples with and about non-Western peoples.

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.[9]

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 18th century, and was eventually adopted in the 20th century by American Orientalists.[10][11] 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 states:

So far as the United States seems to be concerned, it is only a slight overstatement to say that Moslems 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.[12]

Moving from the assertion that 'pure knowledge' is simply not possible (as all forms of knowledge are inevitably influenced by ideological standpoints), 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."[13] 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.

He underscored again and again the importance of understanding the intimate relationship between knowledge and power, declaring: "If the knowledge of Orientalism has any meaning, it is in being a reminder of the seductive degradation of knowledge, of any knowledge, anywhere, at any time."[14]

Thesis of representation

Orientalism (1978) 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.[6]: 2–3 

One of the main themes of Said's critique is that the representations of the Orient as "different" from the West are based entirely on accounts taken from textual sources, many of them produced by Westerners. Modern on-the-ground reality is heavily discounted such that the Orient is implicitly disregarded as incapable or not credible to describe itself.[15]

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:[16]

I doubt if it is controversial, for example, to say that an Englishman in India, or Egypt, in the later nineteenth century, took an interest in those countries, which was never far from their status, in his mind, as British colonies. To say this may seem quite different from saying that all academic knowledge about India and Egypt is somehow tinged and impressed with, violated by, the gross political fact—and yet that is what I am saying in this study of Orientalism.[6]: 11 

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.[13]

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.[13] Difficult because advances in the "electronic transfer of images" is increasing media concentration in the hands of powerful, transnational conglomerates.[13] 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.[13] 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.[13]

Geopolitics and cultural hierarchy

Said said that the Western world sought to dominate the Eastern world for more than 2,000 years, since Classical antiquity (8th c. BC – AD 6th c.), the time of the play The Persians (472 BC), by Aeschylus, which celebrates a Greek victory (Battle of Salamis, 480 BC) against the Persians in the course of the Persian Wars (499–449 BC)—imperial conflict between the Greek West and the Persian East.[6]: 1–2 [17] Europe's long, military domination of Asia (empire and hegemony) 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 (as European intellectual property) the interpretation and translation of Oriental languages, and the critical study of the cultures and histories of the Oriental world.[18] 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.[6]: 38–41 

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 (6–25 October 1973) and the OPEC petroleum embargo (October 1973 – March 1974) 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.[6]: 329–54