Edward Said

Introduction

• Edward Said’s Orientalism is credited with opening the field of Postcolonial Studies and Colonial Discourse Analysis.

• It persistently links the colonial experience with the Empire, and politics with culture.

• The work served as an agency for formerly marginalized peoples, allowing the Empire to write back.

• Orientalism was published in 1978.

• The book critiques oriental studies, or the construction of knowledge of the Orient by the West.

• Said faced hostility from scholars of the Orient, who accused him of crossing the line between arts and politics.

• Despite criticism, many welcomed its iconoclastic violation of boundaries and conventions as liberating and enabling.

• The book challenged and unsettled received ideas of the Orient and Occident.

Defining Orientalism

• Said gives three definitions of Orientalism in the Introduction to his book.

• The first definition: Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient (anthropologists, sociologists, historians, philologists) is an Orientalist, and what they do is Orientalism (p.2).

• This definition highlights the interlinked nature of various disciplines studying the Orient, transgressing academic boundaries.

• Said argues that academic classifications should be disregarded when the subject is the Orient.

• The second definition: Orientalism is a style of thought based on an ontological and epistemological distinction between the Orient and usually the Occident (p.2).

• This broadens the study of Orientalism to include the nature of knowledge and existence itself.

• The scope expands to include poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators (p.2).

• This moves Orientalism from purely academic study to the political realm of administration and creative arts.

• The third definition situates Orientalism in a historical and material context starting from the late eighteenth century.

• Orientalism is a corporate institution that deals with the Orient by making statements, authorizing views, teaching, settling, and ruling over it (p.3).

• It is a Western style of dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.

• The term corporate institution implies a large group performing multiple functions but acting as a single entity.

• Orientalism transcends the academy and becomes a system of socio-political domination by the West.

• Said uses Foucault’s notion of discourse to structure Orientalism as a discursive field uniting diverse materials for study.

• He argues that European culture has not just imaged but produced the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively.

• The project of Orientalism was undertaken because Europe gained strength and identity by setting itself against the Orient as a surrogate or underground self (p.3).

• The Occident needed to produce the Orient to define itself as a superior power.

• Said further defines Orientalism as a distribution of geopolitical awareness involving a geographical distinction (unequal halves: Orient and Occident) and a will or intention to understand (p.12).

• He concludes that Orientalism is not just a representation but a considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, more about “our” world than the Orient itself (p.12).

• Orientalism is a dimension of modern Western culture, expressed in politics and academic disciplines, aimed at gaining authority over the Orient.

• After defining Orientalism’s scope, Said suggests examining how it functions as a discursive field of study.

The Functioning of Orientalism

• Orientalism functions through a large number of disciplines, interests, practices, and power groups working together without a written contract.

• Said uses Antonio Gramsci’s idea of cultural hegemony to explain how Orientalism operates effectively.

• Gramsci distinguishes between civil society and political society.

• Civil society consists of voluntary affiliations such as schools, families, and unions, where membership is by consent, not coercion.

• Culture operates within civil society, and the dominant culture exercises cultural leadership, which Gramsci calls hegemony.

• Said applies the Gramscian notion of cultural hegemony of the industrial West to explain the historical and socio-political production and maintenance of Orientalism.

• European culture is defined by the central idea of European identity as superior to all non-European peoples and cultures.

• Orientalism emerges from Europe’s need to define the Other to assert its superiority through a binary of “us” vs. “them.”

• This binary of Self/Other is dynamic and maintained through a strategy of “flexible positional superiority,” allowing the West to remain superior in various contexts.

• Europe’s historical ascendancy from the late Renaissance to the present provided the basis for this assertion of cultural superiority.

• The economic and political situation allowed diverse Western actors to be present in the Orient and to construct knowledge about it with little resistance from the Orient itself.

• Orientalism linguistically catalogs a wide range of occupations and institutions, including the scientist, scholar, missionary, trader, and soldier.

• These varied roles—intellectual, religious, business, military—worked towards the common goal of “orientalising” the Orient.

• Traditionally known relationships such as the trader and missionary followed by the soldier in colonization are reaffirmed, but Said highlights their common collaborative purpose as novel.

• Emerging academic disciplines like anthropology, sociology, linguistics, race studies, and history supported and justified colonization while maintaining their appearance as pure, apolitical scholarship.

• All these theories originated within civil society and exemplify Western hegemony over the Orient from the late eighteenth century onward.

• Said focuses on civil society rather than state institutions such as the army, police, and bureaucracy, which belong to political society and function by domination.