Edward said & orientalism

One of the spectacular books that appeared in this century is Edward Said’s "Culture and Imperialism", where Said treats culture as a vehicle for the imperialist venture rather than an area of art and learning alone. Following Gramscian parameters by treating culture as an instrument of political control. "Culture and Imperialism" has the ambitious scope of defining the patterns of relationships between the western world and its overseas territories.Spurred by American forays into imperialism, Said takes the reader through 200 years of narrative history with a view to highlighting the unconscious imperial attitudes which underline the narratives of those writers scarcely associated with the goverance of "others".

Connecting Conrad and Jane Austen, for instance, with this enterprise, Said holds them culpable of depicting native peoples as "marginally visible" and "people without history". It is in the very omission of the salient fact of imperialism that much English literature from "Jane Eyre", "Vanity fair" and "Great Expectations" to Raymond Williams’s "Culture and Society" assumes its character.

         For Said, Conrad may be deeply anti-imperialist, but he is also an author who believes with equal conviction that Africa or South America could never have had a history or culture independent of their western masters. Earlier, Defoe’s "Robinson Crusoe" introduced to English gentry the founder of a new world and "Captain Singleton" less explicitly but surely, related to the annexation of riches and lands abroad.

Less directly, Fielding, Richardson, Smolett and Sterne did the same. Indeed, the English cultural forms like the novel and the opera served as important cultural affiliations within England, yet, unconsciously perhaps, ignored the presence of an area outside "felt vaguely and ineptly to be out there" instead of, as a body of humanistic ideas, preventing the acceleration of imperial powers.

We are now well aware of Said’s well-established and canonical 20th century classic, "Orientalism", where he defines this science as a western reading of the Orient that distinguishes the East from the West. Said has argued that the epistemological and ontological categories employed support a relationship of domination and authority.

Further, he claims that the Orient is consistent in its attitudes, behaviour, and patterns of living; the mind of its people is imagined to be static and their thinking as "others"is believed to be vastly inferior to that of the West.

The quintessence of the Orient is seen in its sensuality and passivity, and this view has endured. Not many European travellers, pilgrims, scholars or academics have disagreed widely with this Oriental "truth".

Said has emphasised that the creation of orientalist stereotypes was past of the intellectual exercise that strategically made colonialism possible and legitimised it. The Orient, correspondingly, has been characterised by a variety of essentialist characteristics that vary with the trends of foreign governance.In the interest of colonialism, the Orient was a creation which played a vital role in constituting the differing religious, political, and aesthetic positions of European imperialists. For those legitimising colonialism as a channel of advancement, imperialism was the prerequisite to progress and an antidote to feudalism.

        From within this perspective, academic orientalism can be interpreted in the light of Said’s hypothesis which does not accept the study of the Orient as the only motive of the orientalist. In other words, there is a link between scholarship and power since orientalism, in Said’s terms, is not simply a romantic discipline for disinterested seekers.

        To define the term, Edward Said says in his book titled Orientalism ( New York: Vintage, 1979.):

Orientalismwas The book that made Said famous. It is A critique of the academic field of Oriental Studies, which has been a scholarly pursuit at most of the prestigious European universities for several centuries. Oriental Studies is a composite area of scholarship comprising philology, linguistics, ethnography, and the interpretation of culture through the discovery, recovery, compilation, and translation of Oriental texts. Said makes it clear that he is not attempting to cover the whole area. His focus is on how English, French, and American scholars have approached the Arab societies of North Africa and the Middle East. He has nothing on the other areas that traditionally comprised the field such as Hebrew, Persian, Turkish, Indian, and Far Eastern cultures, nor does he discuss the attitudes of German, Russian, Italian, Spanish, or Portuguese Orientalists. The period he covers is more restricted than the scholarly field, too, extending only from the late eighteenth century to the present, whereas European scholarship on the Orient dates back to the High Middle Ages. Within his time frame, however, Said extends his examination beyond the works of recognized Orientalist academics to take in literature, journalism, travel books, and religious and philosophical studies to produce a broadly historical and anthropological perspective

     Orientalism, according to Edward Said, is inherently linked with knowledge of the "Other" and the literati elite who deal with this knowledge. As he states, [Orientalism] is a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts,..., it is, above all, a discourse... shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political (as with a colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning sciences like comparative linguistics, anatomy, or any other modern policy science), power cultural (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values), power moral (as with ideas about what "we" do and what "they" cannot do or understand as "we" do (1994.p. 12).

        This "discourse" was largely shaped in the political realities of the 19th century but its beginnings lie farther back in time. Said traces it back through Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Dante, all the way to the ancient Greeks. In this sense, the intellectual class was one social grouping responsible for the shaping of Orientalism. One particular group, that I think is important but Said largely ignores, is the missionaries sent from Christian Rome out to the East in the 13th and 14th centuries. Their exotic travelogues and their tales about the search for Presser John?s kingdom fueled the imagination and corrupted the vision of writers and thinkers for centuries to come. 

        The intellectual aspect of Orientalism combined with the political aspects of Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries. The landmark, according to Said, is Napoleon's Egyptian expedition. Said writes, "[Napoleon's] plans for Egypt therefore became the first in a long series of European encounters with the Orient in which the Orientalist?s special expertise was put directly to functional colonial use" (p. 80). This points to the co-existence of an intellectual and a political "Orientalism". The political aspects were rooted in the notions of European supremacy over the Orient. As well as the very real demands of an expanding market economy and the need for political clout among other European nations. The basis of this discourse is, then, literary tradition. But this literary tradition is inextricably combined with political discourse. This relationship is brought to front in the colonial realities of the 18th and 19th centuries. Said is very clear in stating that Orientalism was not the product of colonial rule. He writes, "To say simply that Orientalism was a rationalization of colonial rule is to ignore the extent to which colonial rule was justified in advance by Orientalism, rather than after the fact" (1994.p. 39). 

        Hence, Orientalism as a pattern of knowledge preceded colonialism. Nevertheless, it found willing partners among the statesmen and political leaders of the British, French and American empires. 

Said points out that the vision of Orient existed as far back as the ancient Greeks. However, prior to the colonial era, it is a literary discourse bound in a tradition of writers, texts and conceptualizations. He writes, "Every writer on the Orient (and this is true even of Homer) assumes some Oriental precedent, some previous knowledge of the Orient, to which he refers and on which he relies"(1994.p. 20). Said points towards Aeschylus's The Persians as an example of early attempts to create a Orient. 

        However, it is fairly recently that Orientalism has become a "science" or an extended body of knowledge and tradition. Said points towards two 18th century intellectuals who spearheaded the transition of Orientalism from literary to "scientific" knowledge. One is Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron (1731-1805) who translated the Avesta and "interjected a vision of innumerable civilizations from ages past, of an infinity of literatures" into the intellectual tradition of Europe (1994.p. 77). The second scholar is William Jones, who Said cites as the accepted founder of Orientalism. As Said states, "To rule and to learn, then to compare Orient with Occident: these were Jones' goals" (p. 78). He did that by codifying, tabulating and comparing all he encountered in the Orient.

        These two scholars took Orientalism out of its literary root and supplanted it with a seemingly scientific and objective one. The emphasis was no longer on the description of the exotic but rather on the understanding of it. Keeping within the tradition, these scholars drew upon earlier 17th century works like Barthélemy d'Herbelot's Bibiliothèque orientale .

        The knowledge or understanding gained through the "scientific" study of the Orient, according to Said, leads directly to control and power over the Orient. He writes, "The closeness between politics and Orientalism, or to put it more circumspectly, the great likelihood that ideas about the Orient drawn from Orientalism can be put to political use, is an important yet extremely sensitive truth" (1994.p. 96). Said provides a clear example of this interaction between knowledge of the Orient and the colonial control over the Orient by discussing Lord Balfour's speech to the House of Commons in 1910. In this speech, Lord Balfour tried to justify the presence and involvement of Britain in Egypt. Said writes, "As Balfour justifies the necessity for British occupation of Egypt, supremacy in his mind is associated with 'our' knowledge of Egypt and not principally with military or economic power" (1994.p. 32). In a very basic sense, knowledge is power. It is powerful because it is privileged only to the European and not to the Oriental itself. 

        The basic assumption is that the Orientalist "knows" the Orient-it's religion, it's culture, it's language, it's mind or psyche. He (there is an overwhelmingly paternalistic attitude present here) knows the Orient better than the Orientals do themselves. This leads him to the inevitable and logical conclusion of appropriating the Orient under his power. As Said writes, "To be a European in the Orient, and to be one knowledgeably, one must see and know the Orient as a domain ruled over by Europe" (1994.p. 197). 

     Said's book makes three major claims. The first is that Orientalism, although purporting to be an objective, disinterested, and rather esoteric field, in fact functioned to serve political ends. Orientalist scholarship provided the means through which Europeans could take over Oriental lands. Said is quite dear about the causal sequence: "Colonial rule was justified in advance by Orientalism, rather than after the fact." Imperial administrators like Lord Curzon, a Viceroy of India, agreed that the products of this scholarship—"our familiarity, not merely with the languages of the people of the East but with their customs, their feelings, their traditions, their history, and religion"—had provided "the sole basis upon which we are likely to be able to maintain in the future the position we have won." In the late twentieth century, the field helps preserve American power in the Middle East and defends what Said calls "the Zionist invasion and colonization of Palestine." Today, however, there is much less interest in the traditional fields of philology and literature. American academic centers for Middle Eastern studies are more concerned with providing direct advice to the government on public policy. Overall, Said submits, his work demonstrates "the metamorphosis of a relatively innocuous philological subspecialty into a capacity for managing political movements, administering colonies, making nearly apocalyptic statements representing the White Man's difficult civilizing mission."

        His second claim is that Orientalism helped define Europe's self-image. "It has less to do with the Orient than it does with 'our' world." The construction of identity in every age and every society, Said maintains, involves establishing opposites and "Others." This happens because "the development and maintenance of every culture require the existence of another different and competing alter ego." Orientalism led the West to see Islamic culture as static in both time and place, as "eternal uniform, and incapable of defining itself." This gave Europe a sense of its own cultural and intellectual superiority. The West consequently saw itself as a dynamic, innovative, expanding culture, as well as "the spectator, the judge and jury of every facet of Oriental behavior." This became part of its imperial conceit. In 1810 the French author Chateaubriand called upon Europe to teach the Orient the meaning of liberty which he, and everyone after him, believed the Orientals knew nothing about. Said says he thereby provided the rationale for Western imperialism, which could be described by its perpetrators not as a form of conquest, but as the redemption of a degenerate world.

        Thirdly, Said argues that Orientalism has produced a false description of Arabs and Islamic culture. This happened primarily because of the essentialist nature of the enterprise—that is, the belief that it was possible to define the essential qualities of Arab peoples and Islamic culture. These qualities were seen in uniformly negative terms, he says. The Orient was defined as a place isolated from the mainstream of human progress in the sciences, arts, and commerce. Hence: "its sensuality, its tendency to despotism, its aberrant mentality, its habit of inaccuracy, its backwardness." Where this approach first goes wrong, Said says, is in its belief that there could be such a thing as an Islamic society, an Arab mind, an Oriental psyche. No one today, he points out, would dare talk about blacks or Jews using such essentialist cliches Where Orientalism goes even further astray, he claims, is its anachronistic assumption that Islam has possessed a unity since the seventh century, which can be read, via the Koran, into every facet of, say, modem Egyptian or Algerian society. The notion that Muslims suffer such a form of arrested development not only is false, he maintains, but also ignores more recent and important influences such as the experience of colonialism, imperialism, and, even, ordinary politics.

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