Contra Edward W. Said's Definition of the Orient In the second category of misrepresentation of the Arabs and Islam, Said takes on the American public relations policy. Though there is an extensive body of scholarship on the operation of xenophobic discourses in literature, theoretical approaches are invariably indebted to the work of Edward Said, whose study of Western construction of the Orient concluded that Orientalism, as a hegemonic discourse, was a means by which the Oriental Other could be dominated. Orientalism is used academically to signify Western doctrines and theses about the Orient. Orientalists often describe parts of Southwest Asia and North Africa with the intention of representing the entire Orient, and a wide range of moral attitudes, religions, languages, cultures and political structures are folded into one. Orientalism is a term that was coined by the late academic Edward Said. One without the other is no longer enough and is no longer seen to be enough. As challenging the idea, that differences involve hostility, a frozen and reified set of essences in opposition, and the whole polemical knowledge built on this basis. The West exploited these representations to justify their imperialist policies in the Middle East. Edward Said agrees with Disraeli who said that East is something more than just an idea without corresponding reality. However, this appeared to be highly unlikely, as no scholar had been able to do this so far. In his book, Edward Said clearly stated that Orientalism was not the product of colonial rule. By knowing the Orient, the Occident came to possess it. Palestine 1935. PDF In his introduction to the term "Orientalism," Edward Said begins by European and American) scholarship, literature and cultural representation creates and reinforces a biased view of non-Western cultures. Reorienting Edward Said's Orientalism: Multiple Perspectives They thought it was the duty of the colonizers to educate and civilize them. The period he covers in his book extends from the late eighteenth century to the present. In the second chapter Edward Said talks about structures and restructures of orientalism. He shows how these researchers fashioned their highly selective, biased observations into supposedly scientific findings, thus positioning themselves as objective authorities on Southwest Asia and North Africa. The impact of Orientalism is monumental. Said also explores the work of authors, poets, painters, philosophers and politicians, citing figures as varied as Arthur Balfour, Victor Hugo and Eugne Delacroix. The West was Christian where the Orient was Islamic; its people were Nordic where those of the Orient were Semitic; it was liberal, democratic, and rational where the Orient was backward, despotic, and emotional. It is difficult to be precise about the answer to the question what is Orientalism? Edward Said uses the term in three interdependent senses: 1) Orientalism as a scholarly discipline, 2) Orientalism as a mode of thought based on the essential East-West divide, and 3) Orientalism as a political ideology. Orientalism: Edward Said's groundbreaking book explained The original cover art of Edward Said's book was this Orientalist painting by Jean Leon Gerome: Le charmeur de serpents. Second, Orientalism is a field of academic research that includes everyone who teaches, investigates, and writes about the Orient. But Orientalist perceptions didnt simply disappear after the colonial period. A Complex Relation Between Power and Knowledge In his book, Said observes a spate of harmful and sometimes contradictory stereotypes of so-called Oriental peoples, who are described as lazy, suspicious, gullible, mysterious or untruthful. Such knowledge is constructed through literary texts and historical records. Said demonstrated how policy makers seek out the specialist, in this case the Orientalists, to shape their policies. Given that the field of modern Middle East Studies is only some 50 years old, that it had to extract itself from the hold of a first generation of scholars who still saw the Middle East in very reductionist, ahistorical terms, and that it takes time to build up a core of experts versed in language, history, local knowledge, and the social sciences, we finally have a set of praiseworthy scholars. Said mounts much of his study of Orientalism on analyses of academic research. At the outset I would like to question the term Orientalism for which you have used Edward Said's definition on your site and on which the definition of "the orient" appears to rest in the context of the field of post colonial studies. These tropes form a part of what Palestinian-American intellectual and activist Edward Said called Orientalism. Orientalism has been translated into 36 languages (as of 2003) and remains a classic available in most bookstores. Europe found this counterbalancing entity in the crusades to be the Orient. Said examines these works with reference to the social, political, and economic contexts from which they emerged. Because it is a just cause, a noble ideal, a moral quest for equality and human rights.. Made by Somethin' Else, 19 October 2018. He was a humanist through and through, seeing the world via the optic of literature, music, and the arts, not by the use of supposedly value-free economics, political science, or sociology. So, in a very basic sense, knowledge is power. Edward W. Said - JSTOR He refers to Lacans terminology which describes the mirror stage of development. What is the main argument of Edward Said book Orientalism? These constructs imagined Eastern societies as fundamentally similar and sharing the characteristics that are not possessed by Western societies. Orientalism Summary and Study Guide | SuperSummary , Said examines Western representations (fiction and nonfiction) of the Middle Eastern societies and cultures. Shantaram the Black white man's burden, Friday essay: 5 museum objects that tell a story of colonialism and its legacy, Friday essay: how the West betrayed Syria, The Whitewash is a scathing, hilarious satire of Asian misrepresentation in Hollywood. Id love to hear from you. Edward Said Orientalism: Definition, Summary, Analysis & Quotes - ElifNotes Said also makes it clear that he is not attempting to cover the whole area. These images are actually the negative caricatures of Arab and Islamic culture. 842 Words4 Pages. Said carefully examines what he calls 'Orientalism' in an attempt to show how different cultures view each other . There is a long history of prejudice against people of Arabic or Islamic descent the struggle between the Arabs and the Israelis. Oriental is a noun-form which means an individual or people of the Orient. The basis of Said's argument in Orientalism is that the concept of the "Orient" as understood and used by the Westspecifically France, England, and the United Statesis not the "real" Orient. The basic assumption is that the Orientalist knows the Orient better than Orientals do themselves. He focuses on how American, English, and French scholars have approached the Arab societies of the Middle East and North Africa. The concept of Orientalism was coined by the late Edward Said, a Palestinian-American academic who founded the discipline of Postcolonial Studies. Consequently, the geographical vagueness of the Orient works to conflate a vast and diverse array of landscapes, peoples and cultures into a single, unchanging unit. It was also true of colleagues such as Fred Halliday, who argued that Orientalism could easily be read as creating an irreconcilable division between East and West, thereby undermining one of the basic features of our universalistic approach. Edward Said Orientalism Essay. Orientalism served as an ideological basis for French and British colonial rule. Edward Said: What Is Orientalism? | Shortform Books Orientalism: Edward Said's groundbreaking book explained According to Edward Said, the knowledge about the east is generated not through actual facts but through imagined constructs. Hello, Viewers! It was a completely western term to define Muslims in their own way. These essential qualities were static, unchangeable and inferior to European qualities. He tells the readers that the greater understanding of the topic can help in the unlearning of the processes of cultural domination and prejudiced stance. For this purpose, his major focus is on the works of French Orientalists, such as, , and works of English Orientalists like Edward Lanes Account of the, Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians. Another . Edward Said, in full Edward Wadie Said, sometimes Edward William Said, (born November 1, 1935, Jerusalemdied September 25, 2003, New York, New York, U.S.), Palestinian American academic, political activist, and literary critic who examined literature in light of social and cultural politics and was an outspoken proponent of the political rights Orientalism is a term which indicates how the West perceives the East as the 'other'. According to Said, the knowledge or understanding gained through the Orients scientific study leads directly to control and power over the Orient. Edward Said himself was well aware of what we were attempting via our Review of Middle East Studies having had his attention drawn to it by Fred Halliday, a very important figure in my story. A New Biography of Edward Said, Reviewed | The New Yorker The theme that Said spent the most time developing and producing examples in, The specialist does the immediate translation of mere Oriental matter into useful substance: the Oriental becomes, for example, a subject race, an example of Oriental mentality, all for the enhancement of the authority at home. Said pointed out. What Is Orientalism? The volume emphasizes the need to move beyond the prejudice and stereotyping tied to the context of colonial exploitation. He bases his argument on the work of Gustave von Grunchbaun. It is a mirror image of the inferior, the alien (, is a noun-form which means an individual or people of the Orient. It has been influential in about half a dozen established disciplines, especially literary studies (English, comparative literature), history, anthropology, sociology, area studies (mainly Middle East studies) and comparative religion. And certain passages are more easily read as political and polemical rather than as scholarly and academic, even if this was almost certainly not Edwards original intention. Besides, a field can change so entirely, in even the most traditional disciplines like philology, history or theology, as to make an all-purpose definition of subject matter almost impossible. Why? Third, Orientalism is a corporate institution for dealing with the Orient beginning in the eighteenth century. . It challenges the assumption that oriental studies only served to The author looks deeply into the opinions and propaganda that were fueled into the East by the colonial powers that governed the continent. He attempts to show how Western journalists, fiction writers, and scholars helped to build up a prevalent and hostile image of the Eastern cultures as inferior, stagnant, and degenerate. An example of pure knowledge is basic math. Furthermore, in this chapter, Edward Said endeavors to demonstrate how Orientalism has influenced and affected the Western perceptions of the Arab Middle East and Middle Eastern perceptions of themselves. Furthermore, also in anticipation of Edward Said, we had begun to discuss the ways in which our own social science disciplines, anthropology in particular, played a major role in what Talal Asad called the Colonial Encounter.. He also highlights their efforts to encourage the Easterners to judge themselves by Western criteria and to work for achieving the Western goals. Edward Said limited his discussion of academic Orientalism to late 19th and early 20th century scholarship. It also is worth noting that the personal tone of the book helped to make things even worse. The Orient became the seen, the observed, the studied, and the object. He names names Bernard Lewis in particular. These constructs imagined Eastern societies as fundamentally similar and sharing the characteristics that are not possessed by Western societies. As an intellectual, he exercised tremendous influence on modern literature, criticism and political thinking. Glossary of the Gothic: Xenophobia - Marquette University While the US Department of State has justified the unilateral sanctions as a means to deprive [Bashar al-Assads] regime of the resources it needs to continue violence against civilians, the sanctions have disproportionately affected the civilian population in Syria. Related: A Brief Summary of Orientalism by Edward Said. Orientalism by Edward Said is a canonical text in which he challenges the concept of Orientalism and the difference between east and west. This knowledge is a paraphrase of . Orientalism peels back the supposedly neutral veneer of scientific interest and discovery attached to such projects. This created a certain fixed images about the orientals in the European minds. They also claimed that the orientals have not developed as a nation. Open Document. Edward Saids Major Claims In Orientalism, 6. Once a tradition of superior values of the West and a static view of the Orient developed, the tradition crystalized. This essentialist thinking was a false way of viewing people groups and their culture. This period is characterized with great colonial expansion into the Orient, culminating in the second world war. These four categories are: Popular Image and Social Science Representation. After World War I, orientalism took a more liberal attitude barring the Islam. In his 2003 preface, he wrote, much of the personal investment in this study derives from my awareness of being an Oriental as a child growing up in two British colonies. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading. It means around 1870. According to this view, the Muslim mind is capable of only four out of eight human thought processes. In the book, he described the practice of othering, the making of an identity of others. In this speech, Lord Balfour clearly justified Britains presence and involvement in Egypt. Notes to . New York: Pan-theon Books, 1978. xvi + 328 pages. Third, the social sciences provide a necessary additive to works of analysis which operate simply at the level of discourse and the various ways this has been used to answer questions with little or no attention to what I would still want to call material reality. In Foucaults view, knowledge is power and also the way of gaining power. Europeans thought that they were biologically superior to orientals. Your email address will not be published. It is the field of writing, research and teaching about the orient. But many more have read Edward Said's influential book Orientalism, published in 1978, which applied Foucault's ideas to the legacy of the great European empires. Sign up for a free trial here . It was and is hardly possible for 2+2=4 to enable the domination of another group. Edward Saids starting point in Orientalism is that the existence and development of every culture impels the existence of a different and inevitably competitive other or alter ego. Therefore, Europe, in attempting to construct its self-image, created the Middle East (the Orient) as the ultimate other. The Middle East (the Orient) and the West (the Occident) do not correspond to any stable reality that exists as a natural fact, but are merely products of construction. However, prior to the colonial era, Orientalism was a literary discourse bound in a tradition of writers, texts, research, and conceptualizations. Edward W. Said's Orientalism introduces the concept of Orientalism, a force that has shaped Western (Occidental) academic scholarship, cultural imagination and production, and public policy concerning the space known as the Orient. It is important to see Edward Said's work, and the mixed reception it received, in the round. Educated in British colonial schools and elite US universities, Said linked the experience of being at once an insider and an outsider to the disparity he felt between his own identity as a Palestinian Arab and how Arabs are represented by the West. In Orientalism, Edward Said builds up his argument and analysis in three (3) long chapters. He wrote Orientalism which made great impact on literature and political thinking. Despite his success, Said always had a keen awareness of his identity as an Oriental. His book Orientalism is his exploration of the origins, development, and implications of this manufactured otherness that he experienced so deeply. She likes reading research-informed books that distill the workings of the human brain/mind/consciousness and thinking of ways to apply the insights to her own life. According to Said, the key insight is that Orientalism does not reflect objective truth. Here is a brief summary of all three chapters in Edward Saids, In this chapter, Said traces the development of modern Orientalism by presenting a broadly chronological description. Think of those who argued that the Shia population could be lured into playing an anti-PLO, anti-Syrian role in South Lebanon. Their emphasis was no longer on the description of the exotic but rather on the comprehension of it. The political powers picked up this thread and used it to justify their colonial expansion. For this purpose, he reviews the careers of leading Islamicists of that time like French scholar Lovis Massignon and the English historian Hamilton Gibb. He was also famous as an activist in Middle Eastern politics. You might hear the plucking of an oud, or a haunting voice singing in a double harmonic scale. When it comes to the immediate reception of Edwards work, it was not only many Orientalists, or near-Orientalists, who were upset but also many well versed in what they regarded as a progressive science of society.
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