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In Orientalism, Edward Said builds up his argument and analysis in three (3) long chapters. They made this distinction from their own point of view, dividing into us and them. is used academically to signify Western doctrines and theses about the. What Is Orientalism? Drop me a line anytime, whether its about any queries or demands or just to share your well-being. . Bad Orientalism, paradoxically, though based on the concept of a certain Middle Eastern timelessness, authorizes ambitious schemes of political and social engineering based on short-term considerations while lacking any way of anticipating unexpected long-term consequences. He hopes that the honest work on the Arabs and Near Orient is likely to be done by scholars whose allegiance is to a discipline defined intellectually and not to a field like Orientalism defined either canonically, imperially or geographically., Related:Various Flaws and Weaknesses in Edward Saids Orientalism. As an intellectual, he exercised tremendous influence on modern literature, criticism and political thinking. How does Edward Said define the concept? 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. Said was born in Jerusalem. They contrast themselves with the others, the orientals. Comments on Orientalism 1 st paragraph In part II of the Introduction to Orientalism Said says that the Orient is not a fact of nature, but an idea. The Orient (East) was passive; the Occident (West) was active. Because it is a just cause, a noble ideal, a moral quest for equality and human rights.. The knowledge of the Orient, though flawed, provided the power base from which the colonizers set about their mission. Said also makes it clear that he is not attempting to cover the whole area. Edward Saids Major Claims In Orientalism, 6. 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. 4 Pages. Edward Saids Definition of Orientalism as a Discourse, 3.2. Said further described the process and ultimate goal of colonization: What the machine (the colonial power structure) branches feed into it in the Easthuman material, wealth, knowledge[]is processed by the machine and then converted into more power.. These four categories are: Popular Image and Social Science Representation. Geopolitically Orient signifies the Middle East, Asia and the Far East, territories that were once a part of one or another European Empire. The Concept of Other and Alter Ego in Saids Orientalism, 2. Here Said made a distinction between pure knowledge and political knowledge. Orientalism often continues to be regarded as dangerous, perhaps in particular by those who have never read it. Friday essay: 5 museum objects that tell a story of colonialism and its legacy. And so it has been ever since. It was and is hardly possible for 2+2=4 to enable the domination of another group. Third, Orientalism is a corporate institution for dealing with the Orient beginning in the eighteenth century. He attacks the allegedly inherent inability of the Muslim near Orient to be as richly human as the West. Orientalism, while also extending its breadth to all that is not considered West (The Middle East, India, Russia, etc.). The people of the Orient themselves have had little agency in the creation of Western narratives about them. This means reading Orientalism as carefully as its author would wish and then being able to understand its role as the first part of a project which required the construction of alternative methodologies as its complement. Hello, Viewers! He died on 25 September, 2003 in New York at the age of 67. Local interests are Orientalist special interests, the central authority is the greatest interest of the imperial society as a whole.. However, prior to the colonial era, Orientalism was a literary discourse bound in a tradition of writers, texts, research, and conceptualizations. Orientalism Reconsidered Edward W. Said T here are two sets of problems that I'd like to take up, each of them deriving from the general issues addressed in Orientalism, of which the most important are: the representation of other cultures, societies, histories; the relationship between power and knowledge; the role of He mentioned two 18th century intellectuals who spearheaded the transition of Orientalism from literary to scientific knowledge. For examples, the Arabs are defined as uncivilized people, Indians as superstitious and beggarly and Islam as the religion of the terrorists. The author looks deeply into the opinions and propaganda that were fueled into the East by the colonial powers that governed the continent. In his book, Said mainly focuses on academics working in philology and anthropology: those who wrote about the languages and cultures of Southwest Asia and North Africa. This certainly applied to persons such as Harry Magdoff, the New York editor of the Monthly Review, who asked me to review Orientalism, a book about which he had very mixed feelings. Open Document. 2018 Middle East Institute All Rights Reserved | Accessibility Policy |Built by Social Driver. 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. Orientalist ideas, stereotypes and approaches have been renewed and reiterated over the past two centuries, and we can still see them in circulation today. Still, he employs them because this is how the argument has been framed by the Orientalists. ' Said argued that his distinction emphasized the supremacy of the Occident versus the inferiority of the Orient. For example, they attributed the qualities like laziness, irrationality, uncivilizedness and crudeness to Orientals. He bases his argument on the work of Gustave von Grunchbaun. Sign up to receive the latest publications, event invitations, and our weekly newsletter delivered to your inbox. if(typeof ez_ad_units!='undefined'){ez_ad_units.push([[336,280],'elifnotes_com-box-4','ezslot_2',158,'0','0'])};__ez_fad_position('div-gpt-ad-elifnotes_com-box-4-0'); Edward Said, in his book, adopts a continental interdisciplinary approach to literary criticism, using the principles of phenomenology, existentialism and French structuralism to trace out the connections between literature and politics. Foucault defined discourse as a system of thought that governs the knowledge obtained by a person. Lastly, the Orientalist scholars are the product of the system they come from. According to Edward Said, the knowledge about the east is generated not through actual facts but through imagined constructs. For example, the religion of Christ was Christianity, so they called Islam as Mohammadism. This academic discipline, in Said's view, was primarily an expression of colonial domination. Keep reading for Edward Saids answer to the question: what is Orientalism? 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. He also attempts to trace it by describing a set of devices usually common to the works of popular artists, poets, and scholars. In 1993, he published his most comprehensive works on Post Colonial study Culture and Imperialism and Representations of The Intellectual. Westerners, in comparison, are made to seem strong, progressive and rational. Orientalists might write about countries as varied as Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq with little distinction. Copyright 20102023, The Conversation US, Inc. Edward Said shows how Orientalist writings and ideologies perpetuate views of Middle Eastern people as inferior, subservient, and in need of saving. Said admits that his understanding of orientalism is based on personal dimension as he had witnessed the prejudices of the Westerners towards the orient. For Said, as it was for Foucault, knowledge is power. Europe found this counterbalancing entity in the crusades to be the Orient. Orientalist means a person who studies or writes about the Orient. Edward Said first published Orientalism in 1978 and the book has continued to open readers' eyes to the true effects of biased thought. A Complex Relation Between Power and Knowledge In this latest phase, the highly qualified American area specialists took the lead replacing the earlier philologists. The false essentialism of Orientalism was and is inescapable for any scholar from the West. Firstly, "Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between 'the Orient' and (most of the time) 'the Occident.'" Said argued that his distinction emphasized the supremacy of the Occident versus the inferiority of the Orient. Several enormously important implications follow. In short, Orientalism is a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient. Moreover, it is a way of coming to terms with the Orient (the East) that is based on the Orients special place in European Western culture and experience. Justifications for sanctions in Syria (pictured, 2019) have roots in Orientalist ideas. Chapter II: Oriental Structures and Restructures, 4. It is this policy, by which, he says that contemporary scholars try to perpetuate the traditions set by European Orientalists. Think of those who argued that the Shia population could be lured into playing an anti-PLO, anti-Syrian role in South Lebanon. Therefore, what we need is for the subaltern to speak for itself. Said referred to this as the interaction between latent Orientalism (the system of implicit ideas and beliefs about Southwest Asia and North Africa) and manifest Orientalism (explicit policies and ideologies acted upon by institutions). The video spoofs the yellow filter, a colour-grading style used when depicting places perceived as impoverished or rife with conflict. No less telling was Freds second argument that, for many peoples of the Middle East in the 1970s, works by the scholars Edward defined as Orientalists were sometimes the only source of data for understanding large parts of their own national history. According to Said, the knowledge or understanding gained through the Orients scientific study leads directly to control and power over the Orient. Therefore, they had to be dealt with by maintaining the power of choice. This condition was timeless according to the Europeans. 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. So, a discourse is the product of interaction between power and knowledge interconnected in a never-ending circle. Said noted that no one would dare form essential qualities of the Negro mind or the Jewish personality, however it was acceptable to form essential qualities of the Islamic mind, and the Arab characters. Such an essentialist view of the Orientals, of the Arabs, of the Semites, of Islam, therefore, is tantamount to racism. 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. In the second category of misrepresentation of the Arabs and Islam, Said takes on the American public relations policy. Some of her favorites include Thinking, Fast and Slow, How We Decide, and The Wisdom of the Enneagram. Even though the colonizers often thought they were bringing enlightenment to the uncivilized people, this paternalistic attitude was still as racist as the other forms of dominative theoretical frameworks. 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. The more you look at it, the more it doesnt make sense. Saids first example of this was Napoleons invasion of Egypt in 1978. 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. Said presents a review of the French and English traditions of the study of Muslim Near East during the 19th century and further up to the world war I. He refers to Lacans terminology which describes the mirror stage of development. These policies often involved the domination of those that the specialist studies and thus demonstrated Said and Foucaults conception of knowledge as power. He seems to be motivated by Foucaults notion of a discourse. Is this book an argument only against something, and not for something positive? Like this article? The European Orientalists had keen interest in classical rather than contemporary periods of the Eastern culture. As an adjective the word qualifies anything belonging to the East. According to him, the East was viewed as a textual universe for the West. Palestine 1935. This means reading Orientalism as carefully as its author would wish and then being able to understand its role as the first part of a project which required the construction of alternative methodologies as its complement. The West exploited these representations to justify their imperialist policies in the Middle East. ORIENTALISM, by Edward Said. It challenges the assumption that oriental studies only served to Disney Buys Lucasfilm: The Fight for Creative Control, The Origin of Mankind: How Our Bodies Evolved, Holly Whitakers Quit Like a Woman: Overview, What Is Stoic Philosophyand What Isnt It? During this period, transformation took place relating to philology and social science. Findings in academia inform foreign and domestic policies. They thought it was the duty of the colonizers to educate and civilize them. Once a tradition of superior values of the West and a static view of the Orient developed, the tradition crystalized. Said asserts it is the academic studies that support these negative images. Said also claimed a subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic people and their culture. They claimed that the aim of colonization was to civilize the uncivilized people of the East. , the direction from which the sun rises. They drew imaginary geographical line to demarcate them. The political powers picked up this thread and used it to justify their colonial expansion. This knowledge is a paraphrase of . Said saw this as a grave error. Said argues that by minimising the rich diversity of Southwest Asian and North African peoples, Orientalists turn them into a contrasting image against which the West seems culturally superior. Thus, what is necessary is for each people group to speak for itself and create discourses of its own history. Orientalism is a system of thought and a way of seeing of 'the East' from the colonial gaze of 'the West' as mysterious, intriguing, and exotic, while at the same time primitive, despotic, and savage. It is thus anti-thesis of the West. 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. For this purpose, he reviews the careers of leading Islamicists of that time like French scholar Lovis Massignon and the English historian Hamilton Gibb. The Orientalist enabled the transformation of people into materials by inscribing onto them essential qualities. Read more: In 1991, Said was diagnosed with leukemia. After World War II, the European colonies were lost but the prejudice against the orientals continued. Orientalism has been translated into 36 languages (as of 2003) and remains a classic available in most bookstores. He also attempts to show the extent to which these representations permeate the Western culture. He was a German Orientalists who entertained an almost virulent dislike for Islam. Said quoted Paul Valry as representative of this idea. In "Orientalism," published two decades into a conventional academic career, Said unexpectedly described himself as an "Oriental subject" and implicated almost the entire Western canon, from. One is Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetile-Duperron and the other is William Jones. He argued that without examining Orientalism as a discourse, one cant comprehend the hugely systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manageand even constructthe Orient politically, militarily, sociologically, scientifically, imaginatively and ideologically during the post-Enlightenment period. Said's theory of postcolonialism specifically brought into consideration the false image of the Orient (East). 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. Here I come to the third meaning of Orientalism, which is something more historically and materially defined than either of the other two. Said examines these works with reference to the social, political, and economic contexts from which they emerged. They were not clever, witty, diplomatic or far-sighted like Europeans. For this purpose, he reviews the careers of leading Islamicists of that time like French scholar Lovis Massignon and the English historian Hamilton Gibb. 848 Words. Orientalism is a term which indicates how the West perceives the East as the 'other'. As an adjective the word qualifies anything belonging to the East e.g. The ideologies and practices of Orientalism were originally theorized by Edward Said through his 1978 book . Despite his illness, Said continued his activism for the peace, human rights and social justice. Orientalism is used academically to signify Western doctrines and theses about the Orient. These images are actually the negative caricatures of Arab and Islamic culture. Due to an accident of history, I found myself traveling around the Middle East in 1955/6, and then studying at Oxford at the birth of modern Middle Eastern Studies in the West signaled, inter alia, by the creation of the Center of Middle Eastern studies at Saint Antonys College. Portrayals in popular culture influence the framing of news about Southwest Asia and North Africa, and vice versa. What keeps Orientalism flourishing and relevant is its consistent and active traffic between a variety of fields.
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