Biography[]
Edward Said was born in 1935 in the British-ruled Jerusalem, Palestine.
He and his family immigrated to Cairo at the end of 1947 after experiencing the hostile political climate within Palestine (Norton 1780)
He was educated in both British and American colonial schools in Cairo. After being expelled from school in 1951 for "disciplinary reasons," Said was sent to a prep school in Massachusetts to complete high school and gain U.S. citizenship (Norton 1780).
He attended Princeton University and received his B.A. in 1957 before continuing his education at Harvard, where he received both his M.A. in 1960 and Ph.D. in English and comparative literature in 1964.
He began his academic career at Columbia University in 1963, occupying a number of prestigious roles. He "held distinguished visiting professorships at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford" (Norton 1781).
His books were awarded several honors including a National Books Critics Circle Award for Orientalism.
from Orientalism[]
Background and Historical Context[]
Orientalism was published in 1978, a time when the turmoil between the Middle East and the West was intensifying. The introduction to Said in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism notes that the creation of the Jewish state of Israel was not seen as the reclamation for those living in the Middle East that the West portrayed it to be. The Palestinians referrer to it as nakbah, for "disaster," while the West celebrates it as the healing reestablishment of the Jewish homeland. Said himself is quoted as saying, "Israel was established; Palestine was destroyed" (Norton 1780).
"Orientalism was immediately recognized as a critical classic, with an impact not only on literary studies, but also on anthropology, history, international studies, and the discipline known as Orientalism" (1783).
According to Said, "Orientalism reveals more about the West and its fantasies than it does about the actual people, culture, and history of the East" (1783).
Key Terms[]
Cultural Studies - a field of theoretically, politically, and empirically engaged cultural analysis that concentrates upon the political dynamics of contemporary culture, its historical foundations, defining traits, conflicts, and contingencies
Hegemony: "an indispensable concept for any understanding of cultural life in the industrial West" (1788). "Leadership or dominance, especially by one country or social group over others" (Google).
Institutional Studies - that part of the social sciences which studies how institutions—i.e., structures and mechanisms of social order and cooperation governing the behavior of two or more individuals—behave and function according to both empirical rules (informal rules-in-use and norms) and also theoretical rules (formal rules and law).
Orientalism: A term "to refer to the historical and ideological process whereby false images of and myths about the Eastern or "Oriental" world have been constructed in various Western discourses" (Bedford Glossary, 358). "A way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient's special place in European's Western experience" (Norton 1784).
The Occident: "the dominant West" (1780).
The Orient: "the Middle and Far East" (1780).
Orientalized: the idea that the Orient was created (1787).
Philology - the branch of knowledge that deals with the structure, historical development, and relationships of a language or languages.
Postcolonial Theory - the academic study of the cultural legacy of colonialism and imperialism, focusing on the human consequences of the control and exploitation of colonized people and their lands
Poststructuralism - argues that to understand an object (e.g., a text), it is necessary to study both the object itself and the systems of knowledge that produced the object
Race and Ethnicity Studies - the interdisciplinary study of difference—chiefly race, ethnicity, and nation, but also sexuality, gender, and other such markings—and power, as expressed by the state, by civil society, and by individuals.
Representation - the use of signs that stand in for and take the place of something else
Strategic Location: a way of describing the author's position in a text with regard to the Oriental material he writes about (1799).
Strategic Formation: a way of analyzing the relationship between texts and the way in which groups of texts acquire mass, density, and referential power among themselves and thereafter in the culture at large (1799).
Key Quotations[]
"The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe's greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other" (1784).
"Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient--and this applies whether the person is an anthropologist, sociologist, historian, or philologist--either in its specific or its general aspects, is an Orientalist, and what he or she does is Orientalism" (1784 3rd).
"Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient--dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it" (1785).
In brief, because of Orientalism the Orient was not (and is not) a free subject of thought or action. This is not to say that Orientalism unilaterally determines what can be said about the Orient, but that it is the whole network of interests inevitably brought to bear on (and therefore always involved in ) any occasion when that peculiar entity 'the Orient' is in question" (1785).
"...men make their own history; that what they can know is what they have made, and extend it to geography: as both geographical and cultural entities--to say nothing or historical entities--such locales, regions, geographical sectors as 'Orient' and 'Occident' are man-made" (1786).
"Orientalism, therefore, is not an airy European fantasy about the Orient, but a created body of theory and practice in which, for many generations, there has been considerable material investment" (1788).
"The scientist, the scholar, the missionary, the trader, or the soldier was in, or thought about, the Orient because he could be there, or could think about it, with very little resistance on the Orient's part" (1871/1789 3rd ed).
"The imaginative examination of things Oriental was based more or less exclusively upon a sovereign Western consciousness out of whose unchallenged centrality an Oriental world emerged, first according to general ideas about who or what was an Oriental, then according to a detailed logic governed not simply by empirical reality but by a battery of desires, repressions, investments, and projections" (1789).
"If it is true that no production of knowledge in the human sciences can ever ignore or disclaim its author's involvement as a human subject in his own circumstances, then it must also be true that for a European or American studying the Orient there can be no disclaiming the main circumstances of his actuality: that he comes up against the Orient as a European or American first, as an individual second" (1792).
"It [Orientalism] is rather a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but also of a whole series of 'interests' which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it now only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct/ corresponding relationship with political power in the raw' but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power, 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 or 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)" (1792).
"The nexus of knowledge and power creating 'the Oriental' and in a sense obliterating him as a human being is therefore not for me an exclusively academic matter" (1805).
Discussion[]
The Orient and Occident[]
In Orientalism, Said presents the idea that the representation of the Orient is created through literary endeavors by the Occident. He states that since we live in an "electronic, postmodern world...there has been a reinforcement of stereotypes by which the Orient is viewed" (1804). Western cultures does not take into serious consideration the various cultures that make up the Orient and instead subscribe to generalized a set of ideas. Western knowledge about the East is not generated from facts or reality, but from archetypes that perceive all “Eastern” societies as fundamentally similar to one another, and fundamentally dissimilar to “Western” societies. This consequent knowledge establishes “the East” as antithetical to “the West.”
Said goes beyond addressing the issues of "Orientalism" and the "Orient" in a number of ways. He examines the representation of power held by Western culture and those who are lesser in power or power-less, which is how the East is viewed. Said 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...Orientalism is premised upon exteriority, that is, on the fact that the Orientalist, poet or scholar, makes the Orient speak, describes the Orient, renders it mysteries plain for and to the West. He is never concerned with the Orient except as the first cause of what he says. What he says and writes, by virtue of the fact that it is said or written, is meant to indicate that the Orientalist is outside the Orient, both as an existential and as a moral fact. (1784)
Another quote later on the page sums up this idea:
The things to look at are style, figures of speech, setting, narrative devices, historical and social circumstances, not the correctness of the representation nor its fidelty to some great original. The exteriority of the representation is always governed by some version of the truism that if the Orient could represent itself, it would; since it cannot, the representation does the job, for the West, and faute de mieux, for the poor Orient. (1785)
This aspect of Said's argument encompasses issues that are relevant even today. Since the Orient is the same as the Othered people present day, these quotes could not be more true. Many times those who are not in the shoes of the experiencer try to speak for their experience. Would it do more justice to the East, or Orient, or Other, if authors were to help those who do not have a voice to have a voice by writing their story or experience from their point of view with the information gathered from that experiencer in order to reveal an actual look into their lives free from the influence of Western culture? (A simple but successful example of of this is found in a children's book titled A Long Walk to Water, in which author Linda Sue Park interviewed and relayed Salva's and Nya's experiences in the Sudan.)
Said's statement that "The Orient was Orientalized not only because it was discovered to be 'oriental' in all those ways considered commonplace by an average nineteenth-century European, but also because it could be--that is, submitted to being--made Oriental" (pg 1870) shows the power situations in imperialist theory, where one participant makes an assumption (in this example regarding commonplaces) and because of economic and military influence, the other participant capitulates to the assumption.
Connections to Marxism[]
Said's arguments rely heavily on a single conceit, " . . . no production of knowledge in the human sciences can ever ignore or disclaim its author's involvement as a human subject in his own circumstances" (1792). His point is that there is no such thing as true objectivity; every person brings themselves into everything they read, write, create, study, etc. Included in this "self" is the individual's placement in the world. Where Marxist theory might be most concerned with an individual's place within a certain class structure, Said is interested in the literal geography that a person inhabits and how this colors every bit of knowledge they absorb and/or produce.
Other Works by Author[]
- Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966)
- Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975)
- Orientalism (1978)
- The Question of Palestine (1979)
- Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (1981)
- "Orientalism Revisited" in Literature, Politics, and Theory (ed. Francis Barker et al.,1986)
- Culture and Imperialism (1993)
- The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determine, 1969-1994 (1994)
- Representations of the Intellectual (1994)
- The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After (2000)
- Music at the Limits (2007)
References[]
Leitch, Vincent B., editor. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 3rd ed., W.W. Norton & Co., 2018.
Owen, Roger. "Edward Said and the Two Critiques of Orientalism." Middle East Institute. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Sept. 2016.