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Edward Said's evaluation and critique of the set of beliefs known as Orientalism forms an important background for postcolonial studies. His work highlights the inaccuracies of a wide variety of assumptions as it questions various paradigms of thought which are accepted on individual, academic, and political levels.
The
Orient signifies
a system of representations framed by political forces that brought the Orient
into Western learning, Western consciousness, and Western empire. The Orient
exists for the West, and is constructed by and in relation to the West. It is a
mirror image of what is inferior and alien ("Other") to the West.
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.
The Oriental is the person represented by such thinking. The man is depicted as feminine, weak, yet strangely dangerous because he poses a threat to white, Western women. The woman is both eager to be dominated and strikingly exotic. The Oriental is a single image, a sweeping generalization, a stereotype that crosses countless cultural and national boundaries.
Latent Orientalism is the unconscious, untouchable certainty about what the Orient is. Its basic content is static and unanimous. The Orient is seen as separate, eccentric, backward, silently different, sensual, and passive. It has a tendency towards despotism and away from progress. It displays feminine penetrability and supine malleability. Its progress and value are judged in terms of, and in comparison to, the West, so it is always the Other, the conquerable, and the inferior.
Manifest Orientalism is what is spoken and acted upon. It includes information and changes in knowledge about the Orient as well as policy decisions founded in Orientalist thinking. It is the expression in words and actions of Latent Orientalism.
The first 'Orientalists' were
19th century scholars who translated the writings of 'the Orient'
into English, based on the assumption that a truly effective colonial conquest
required knowledge of the conquered peoples. This idea of knowledge as power is
present throughout Said's critique. By knowing the Orient, the West came to own
it. The Orient became the studied, the seen, the observed, the object;
Orientalist scholars were the students, the seers, the observers, the subject. The Orient was passive; the West was active.
One of the most significant constructions of Orientalist scholars is that of the Orient itself. What is considered the Orient is a vast region, one that spreads across a myriad of cultures and countries. It includes most of Asia as well as the Middle East. The depiction of this single 'Orient' which can be studied as a cohesive whole is one of the most powerful accomplishments of Orientalist scholars. It essentializes an image of a prototypical Oriental—a biological inferior that is culturally backward, peculiar, and unchanging—to be depicted in dominating and sexual terms. The discourse and visual imagery of Orientalism is laced with notions of power and superiority, formulated initially to facilitate a colonizing mission on the part of the West and perpetuated through a wide variety of discourses and policies. The language is critical to the construction. The feminine and weak Orient awaits the dominance of the West; it is a defenseless and unintelligent whole that exists for, and in terms of, its Western counterpart. The importance of such a construction is that it creates a single subject matter where none existed, a compilation of previously unspoken notions of the Other. Since the notion of the Orient is created by the Orientalist, it exists solely for him or her. Its identity is defined by the scholar who gives it life.
Said argues that Orientalism
can be found in current Western depictions of "Arab" cultures. The
depictions of "the Arab" as irrational, menacing, untrustworthy,
anti-Western, dishonest, and—perhaps most importantly—prototypical, are ideas
into which Orientalist scholarship has evolved. These notions are trusted as
foundations for both ideologies and policies developed by the Occident. Said
writes: "The hold these instruments have on the mind is increased by the
institutions built around them. For every Orientalist, quite literally, there
is a support system of staggering power, considering the ephemerality of the
myths that Orientalism propagates. The system now culminates into the very
institutions of the state. To write about the Arab Oriental world, therefore,
is to write with the authority of a nation, and not with the affirmation of a
strident ideology but with the unquestioning certainty of absolute truth backed
by absolute force." He continues, "One would find this kind of
procedure less objectionable as political propaganda—which is what it is, of
course—were it not accompanied by sermons on the objectivity, the fairness, the
impartiality of a real historian, the implication always being that Muslims and
Arabs cannot be objective but that Orientalists. . . .
writing about Muslims are, by definition, by training,
by the mere fact of their Westernness. This is the
culmination of Orientalism as a dogma that not only degrades its subject matter
but also blinds its practitioners."
Said's Project
Said calls into question the underlying assumptions that form the foundation of Orientalist thinking. A rejection of Orientalism entails a rejection of biological generalizations, cultural constructions, and racial and religious prejudices. It is a rejection of greed as a primary motivating factor in intellectual pursuit. It is an erasure of the line between 'the West' and 'the Other.' Said argues for the use of "narrative" rather than "vision" in interpreting the geographical landscape known as the Orient, meaning that a historian and a scholar would turn not to a panoramic view of half of the globe, but rather to a focused and complex type of history that allows space for the dynamic variety of human experience. Rejection of Orientalist thinking does not entail a denial of the differences between 'the West' and 'the Orient,' but rather an evaluation of such differences in a more critical and objective fashion. 'The Orient' cannot be studied in a non-Orientalist manner; rather, the scholar is obliged to study more focused and smaller culturally consistent regions. The person who has until now been known as 'the Oriental' must be given a voice. Scholarship from afar and second-hand representation must take a back seat to narrative and self-representation on the part of the 'Oriental.'