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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. Middle East Institute Read more: Said maintained that it is the stereotypes and prejudices that determine the Western representation of the Orient. Gabriel Baers response was that the name of the Society would be changed over his dead body. Shimon Shamirs response was that the book represented the ravings of a deranged Palestinian. By the same token, it allows those who still practice some version of an Orientalist approach to insulate themselves, and their students, from a powerful, alternative, point of view. The West exploited these representations to justify their imperialist policies in the Middle East. By knowing the Orient, the Occident came to possess it. The knowledge of the Orient, though flawed, provided the power base from which the colonizers set about their mission. 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. Although he restricted his discussion to academic study of the history and culture of Middle Eastern Africa and Asia, Said clearly asserted that Orientalism is, and does not merely represent, a significant dimension of modern political and intellectual culture.. They claimed that the aim of colonization was to civilize the uncivilized people of the East. Wikimedia. She has a degree in Psychology and a deep passion for the subject. Orientalism is a term which indicates how the West perceives the East as the 'other'. He was a German Orientalists who entertained an almost virulent dislike for Islam. For instance, we can see them at work in the ways the United States and European Union have endowed themselves with the authority to impose what a 2022 UN report called suffocating economic sanctions against Syria. In the light of this perception, the Middle East is static, unalterable, and cant define itself. The study of orientalism is a part of colonial domination of Europe over the Eastern countries. Orientalism is 'a manner of regularized (or Orientalized) writing, vision, and study, dominated by imperatives, perspectives, and ideological biases ostensibly suited to the Orient.' It is the image of the 'Orient' expressed as an entire system of thought and scholarship. This included, among many other issues, an attempt to come to terms with the way in which not just the traditional academic Orientalists but also several of the founders of Western social science, most notably Marx and Weber, held Orientalist-type views concerning a fundamental difference between East and West. Edward Said also described 'Orientalism' as a discourse, a definition he takes from the French philosopher and historian, Michel Foucault. if(typeof ez_ad_units!='undefined'){ez_ad_units.push([[300,250],'elifnotes_com-leader-1','ezslot_4',123,'0','0'])};__ez_fad_position('div-gpt-ad-elifnotes_com-leader-1-0'); This chapter of Orientalism begins at the point where its predecessor had left off. The West exploited these representations to justify their imperialist policies in the Middle East. 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. This was totally illogical artificial distinction. In the second category of misrepresentation of the Arabs and Islam, Said takes on the American public relations policy. Such knowledge is constructed through literary texts and historical records. Said claims that his analysis is quite objective and neutral. This concept of a foreign and strange East forms a set of cultural, political, religious, and linguistic contrasts which, in turn, has enabled the West to think of itself as a distinctand superiorentity. 1. It means around 1870. The vision of Orient, Said stated that, existed as far back as the ancient Greeks. Said himself acknowledged this. In 1975-76, Said was a fellow at the center for Advanced Study at Stanford University. One without the other is no longer enough and is no longer seen to be enough. Therefore, what we need is for the subaltern to speak for itself. The period he covers in his book extends from the late eighteenth century to the present. These essential qualities were static, unchangeable and inferior to European qualities. ' Orientalism' by Edward Said is a canonical text in which he challenges the concept of Orientalism and the difference between east and west. In the end, Orientalism represents the interpretation and creation of the Orientby Westerners, for Westerners. Sign up for a free trial here . Read more: These images are actually the negative caricatures of Arab and Islamic culture. Said analyses a vast, organised body of knowledge on the Middle East, starting with Napolons 1798 invasion of Egypt, for which a legion of scholars, writers and scientists were enlisted to collect as much information about Egypt as they could. While the term has been used to describe countries in East and South Asia, Said mainly focuses on how its used in relation to Southwest Asia and North Africa, or the Middle East. Edward Said's Definition of 'Orientalism' as a Discourse. In 1993, he published his most comprehensive works on Post Colonial study Culture and Imperialism and Representations of The Intellectual. Edward Said examines the role of these area specialists of the East. Said suggests that the orient does not mean the same to American as it does to the European countries, Said says that orientalism refers to academic interpretation. Said uses the word Orient to signify a system of representation framed by political forces that brought the Orient or the East into Western Empire, Western learning and Western consciousness. Said asserts it is the academic studies that support these negative images. The Western people think that all Eastern societies are fundamentally similar sharing quite different and exotic characteristics. Lastly, the Orientalist scholars are the product of the system they come from. You might hear the plucking of an oud, or a haunting voice singing in a double harmonic scale. Orientalism is a 1978 book by Edward W. Said, in which the author establishes the term "Orientalism" as a critical concept to describe the West's commonly contemptuous depiction and portrayal of The East, i.e. Said argued that such knowledge is built through literary texts and historical records which are often limited in terms of their understanding of the authenticity of life in the Middle East. During this period, transformation took place relating to philology and social science. Said argued that Orient and Occident worked as antithetical terms. | Find, read and cite all the research . These constructs imagined Eastern societies as fundamentally similar and sharing the characteristics that are not possessed by Western societies. Edward Said first published Orientalism in 1978 and the book has continued to open readers' eyes to the true effects of biased thought. 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.. The Middle East Institute (MEI) is an independent, non-partisan, non-for-profit, educational organization. Hence, the intense, ludicrous, alarming and, I would hope, unique way in which the field of modern Middle Eastern studies has become polarized between the followers of Edward Said and those of Bernard Lewis and, now between those belonging to the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) and its newly-created rival, the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA). Edward Said published his controversial book Orientalism in 1978, which talks about how Orientalism forms an inferior Orient, in terms of knowledge and domination. However, prior to the colonial era, Orientalism was a literary discourse bound in a tradition of writers, texts, research, and conceptualizations. The Concept of Other and Alter Ego in Saids Orientalism, 2. is the multiple relationships between the act of writing and cultural politics, language, and power. And then, having spent a sentence mentioning a number of what he called new departures, including the work of my own group called the Hull group after the venue of our first few workshops he notes that he does not attempt to do. Saids first example of this was Napoleons invasion of Egypt in 1978. For a listing of MEI donors, please click here. Said also defines Orientalism as a western technique which they had used to colonized the world. Said carefully examines what he calls 'Orientalism' in an attempt to show how different cultures view each other . Reading and thinking about Orientalism when it was first published I, and some but not many of my colleagues, experienced a great sense of relief. Sign up to receive the latest publications, event invitations, and our weekly newsletter delivered to your inbox. Later, he studied at Harvard and wrote his Ph.D. thesis on Joseph Conrad. Prof Evelyn Alsultany breaks it down. According to Said, the Orient is a semi-mythical construct imposed on a set of countries east of Europe. The basic assumption is that the Orientalist knows the Orient better than Orientals do themselves. The Orient became the seen, the observed, the studied, and the object. It does not engage in advocacy and its scholars opinions are their own. Given the vast changes in the world in the 1960s and the great desire to liberate ourselves from the world views of race and empire, it was only natural that young persons like me should have turned to the new fields of economic development, social history, sociology, and, particularly, social anthropology for our alternatives using them, as best we could, to re-read, and then re-shape and re-use, major modern era texts like Gibb and Bowens Islam and the West, Halil Inalciks articles worrying at the notion of Ottoman decline, and Albert Houranis own work on the so-called Islamic city., Given the temper of these times, it was also natural that those early social science critics of Orientalist scholarship should band together in workshops around joint projects designed to employ what we identified as the German-style 19th century critique both to expose the lack of real explanatory value in traditional Orientalism and to begin to provide what we took to be a more useful way of studying the modern Middle East. Westerners, in comparison, are made to seem strong, progressive and rational. Second, we need to continue the good work of combining training in languages, history, and culture with training in the social sciences begun in most American and European centers of Middle Eastern studies. Drop me a line anytime, whether its about any queries or demands or just to share your well-being. It has been influential in about half a dozen established disciplines, especially literary studies (English, comparative. According to Said, the knowledge or understanding gained through the Orients scientific study leads directly to control and power over the Orient. . He argues that the treatments of Arabs and Islam by the area specialists are predictably and routinely negative as they derive from the transference of the popular anti-Semitic animus from Jews to Arabs. Al-Azm was to make the same point only a few years later. Required fields are marked *. 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. They made this distinction from their own point of view, dividing into us and them. For Said, as it was for Foucault, knowledge is power. Friday essay: how the West betrayed Syria. This was another example of knowledge as power. 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 A good example of this is what used to be called Islamic legal studies, studied only through certain canonic texts, and posited on the notion that the master story was one in which modern legal codes imported tout court from the West quickly supplanted so-called traditional Sharia law, confining it simply to the area of personal status. In the book, he described the practice of othering, the making of an identity of others. For examples, the Arabs are defined as uncivilized people, Indians as superstitious and beggarly and Islam as the religion of the terrorists. Just as important, as he explained to me, he had come to the end of his year at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Palo Alto tired out by writing Chapters 1 and 2 and in such a hurry to finish that he raced through Chapter 3, Orientalism now, without either thinking through his argument as far as the relationship between Orientalism and the modern centers of modern Middle Eastern studies was concerned, or paying much attention to the alternatives which he left, clearly and specifically, to others. 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. The term Oriental was often used to describe any person or group of people east of Europe, usually from Arab and/or Islamic countries. Said deplores that the modern Orient has fallen for the bait and is participating in its own Orientalizing. They did not know how to deal with the cruel world. They contrast themselves with the others, the orientals. Said asserted, No scholar, not even a Massignon, can resist the pressures on him of his nation or of the scholarly tradition in which he works. Said, in step with his rejection of essentialism, did go on to say that one must allow for the possibility of an individual genius transcending ones situation. But Orientalists arent exclusively tucked away in ivory towers. Keep reading for Edward Saids answer to the question: what is Orientalism? And this, Said stresses, is how Orientalism sustains its power: through repetition. It is detailed work that makes a tremendous influence on modern thinking and outlook about the orient. Edward Said takes note of the lectures of Humilton Gibb as director of the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University specially his views on the Arab Mind and the aversion of the Muslim from the thought process of rationalism, referring to Islam as Mohammedanism. The author looks deeply into the opinions and propaganda that were fueled into the East by the colonial powers that governed the continent. According to him, they helped to perpetuate the dynamics of Orientalism in their representation of Islam and Arabs in four categories. 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. The central premise of Orientalism is that the Orient is a fundamentally different, exotic, dangerous, unchanging, and other place. The Europeans generalized attributes of the oriental people and began to portray them through their scientific reports, media sources and literary works. Besides being the Founder and Owner of this website, I am a Government Officer. It is powerful since it is privileged only to the European and not to the Oriental itself. They lived with them as if they were the part of orientals. Here is a brief summary of all three chapters in Edward Saids Orientalism: The Scope of Orientalism covers all the dimensions of the subject, both in terms of historical experiences and time period. Said demonstrated how policy makers seek out the specialist, in this case the Orientalists, to shape their policies. 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 begins this chapter with a discussion of Orientalism in the 1920s and 1930s. 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. By Helena February 3, 2021. by Aeschylus as an example of early attempts to create an Orient. Probably none of us also understood how the presence of the book would complicate our new task, even though there were many indications of the problems and difficulties that lay ahead. 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 first is that we need the social sciences in Middle East studies not just for their own sake, but also to be able to continue to make use of works by persons we regard as Orientalists, though without falling prey to their assumptions and reductionism. Rather, it created a space in which justifications of the Occidentals political and cultural domination could be imposed on the Orient. After World War I, orientalism took a more liberal attitude barring the Islam. He also attempts to show the extent to which these representations permeate the Western culture. Secondly, Orientalism was actually more about defining itself through the mirror of the East rather than it was about objectively studying it. He was also famous as an activist in Middle Eastern politics. Despite his illness, Said continued his activism for the peace, human rights and social justice. In the first chapter, Edward Said explains how the science of orientalism developed and how the Westerners/ Europeans started considering the orientals as non-human beings. In this chapter, Said traces the development of modern Orientalism by presenting a broadly chronological description. Said examines these works with reference to the social, political, and economic contexts from which they emerged. Orientalism is a constant one, and since the late eighteenth century there has been a considerable, quite disciplined-perhaps even regulated-traffic between the two. Said's Orientalism is the foundational work on which postcolonial literary theory developed. He also highlights their efforts to encourage the Easterners to judge themselves by Western criteria and to work for achieving the Western goals. Is this book an argument only against something, and not for something positive? In this latest phase, the highly qualified American area specialists took the lead replacing the earlier philologists. My aim was not so much to eliminate the differences who can ever deny the constitutive character of national and cultural differences in relationships between human beings? We can also attribute the growing awareness of Orientalist tropes to his books vast popularity. It was and is hardly possible for 2+2=4 to enable the domination of another group. 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. As a result, these often racist or romanticised stereotypes create a worldview that justifies Western colonialism and imperialism. They romanticized the oriental land and their behavior. 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. MEI welcomes financial donations, but retains sole editorial control over its work and its publications reflect only the authors views. He seems to be motivated by Foucaults notion of a discourse. Said also explores the work of authors, poets, painters, philosophers and politicians, citing figures as varied as Arthur Balfour, Victor Hugo and Eugne Delacroix. Edward Said substantially invented both the term Orientalism and the field of postcolonial studies. 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. Orientalism often continues to be regarded as dangerous, perhaps in particular by those who have never read it. , Said examines Western representations (fiction and nonfiction) of the Middle Eastern societies and cultures. It is a mirror image of the inferior, the alien (, is a noun-form which means an individual or people of the Orient. 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. 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. 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. But, as a pattern of knowledge, it preceded colonialism. However, [humans] make their own history and every society is in a constant state of flux and development. Since it was almost impossible for any scholar in the West to break free of these bonds, how can one learn of other peoples groups? 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. 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. EDWARD W. SAID 163 most committed partisans- usually scholars, professors, experts, and the like- claim it is. Edward Said was a great scholar and an important figure in Post-Colonial studies. 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 1967, Israel occupied the Palestine territories which forced Said to take political stance for the liberation of Palestine. 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. Political and social ideas that were manipulated and implanted by the British mainly dominating the East during colonization.