Said argues that ‘such texts can create not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe‘ (1978:94). The Orient then seems to be, not an unlimited extension beyond the familiar European world, but rather a closed field, a theatrical stage affixed to Europe. Such objectification entails the assumption that the Orient is essentially monolithic, with an unchanging history, while the Occident is dynamic, with an active history. But Napoleon‘s expedition gave an unmistakable direction to the work of Orientalists that was to have a continuing legacy, not only in European and Middle Eastern history but in world history as well. Knowledge of the Orient, because generated out of strength, says Said, in a sense creates the Orient, the Oriental and his world. More seriously, the ad hominem attacks on Said and his band of alleged Pied Pipers also make it more difficult to sustain an attack on the role of Orientalists in authorizing certain aspects not only of American military and security policy but those of Israel as well. Orientalism: a Brief Definition Edward Said [From Orientalism, New York: Vintage, 1979.]. The second part of the book is an exposition of ‘Orientalist structures and restructures’. ——(1994a) Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution, Durham, NC:Duke University Press. It worked this way because the intellectual accomplishments of Orientalist discourse served the interests, and were managed by the vast hierarchical web, of imperial power. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! Edward Said's groundbreaking critical work Orientalism (1978) is widely acknowledged as the cornerstone of what has evolved into a multifaceted and diverse conceptual framework known as 'postcolonial theory.' In his book Orientalism, Edward Said addresses the idea that the way the Orient has (and still is) pictured and understood by the West is not only diminishing but closer to mythology than reality. Innholdsfortegnelse i word Said, Edward (1977)) Orientalism. Orientalismo (in inglese Orientalism) è un saggio pubblicato nel 1978 da Edward Said, che tentò di spiegare e ridefinire le modalità con cui l'Europa rappresenta, nella sua storia, l'"Oriente". ‘Quite literally, the occupation gave birth to the entire modern experience of the Orient as interpreted from within the universe of discourse founded by Napoleon in Egypt‘ (1978:87). (1978:107). The knowledge of the Orient created by and embodied within the discourse of Orientalism serves to construct an image of the Orient and the Orientals as subservient and subject to domination by the Occident. When Edward Said's "Orientalism" was first published in 1978 it drew heavy attention and controversy due to its attack on not only the ground assumptions of the academic field of oriental studies, but on the whole manner in which East and West are portrayed. Where the idea of Orientalism as a learned field suggests an enclosed space, the idea of representation is a theatrical one: the Orient is the stage on which the whole East is confined. In its broadest sense, Orientalism is the framework through which Western writers, policymakers, and the general public have interpreted and defined “the Orient” (the eastern part of Asia). Said points out that the upsurge in Orientalist study coincided with the period of unparalleled European expansion: from 1815 to 1914. Influenced by the imperialism and colonialism of the 19th century, Western people became interested in the natives and the cultures of Western colonies. Although not the beginning of the Orientalism that swept Europe early in the century, Napoleon‘s project demonstrated the most conscious marriage of academic knowledge and political ambition. By1995, Orientalism had become a ‘collective book‘ that had ‘superseded‘ its author more than could have been expected. The concept of Orientalism was coined by the late Edward Said, a Palestinian-American academic who founded the discipline of Postcolonial Studies. In Cromer‘s and Balfour‘s language, the Oriental is depicted as something one judges (as in a court of law), something one studies and depicts (as in a curriculum), something one disciplines (as in a school or prison), something one illustrates (as in a zoological manual). But Napoleon‘s tactics—persuading the Egyptian population that he was fighting on behalf of Islam rather than against it —utilizing as he did all the available knowledge of the Koran and Islamic society that could be mustered by French scholars, comprehensively demonstrated the strategic and tactical power of knowing. Orientalism thus becomes a form of ‘radical realism‘ by which an aspect of the Orient is fixed with a word or phrase ‘which then is considered either to have acquired, or more simply be, reality’ (1978:72). The key to Said‘s interest in this way of knowing Europe‘s others is that it effectively demonstrates the link between knowledge and power, for it ‘constructs‘ and dominates Orientals in the process of knowing them. La sua interpretazione apri un dibattito molto acceso. Quite simply, the idea of an Orient exists to define the European. The power that underlies these representations cannot be divorced from the operations of political force, even though it is a different kind of power, more subtle, more penetrating and less visible. Central to the emergence of the discourse is the imaginative existence of something called ‘the Orient‘, which comes into being within what Said describes as an ‘imaginative geography‘ because it is unlikely that we might develop a discipline called ‘Occidental studies‘. This construction and rendering visible of the Orient served the colonial administration that subsequently utilized this knowledge to establish a system of rule. As a discourse, Orientalism is ascribed the authority of academics, institutions and governments, and such authority raises the discourse to a level of importance and prestige that guarantees its identification with ‘truth‘. “Orientalism is a rethinking of what has been considered an impassable gulf between East and West for centuries. But one side had the power to determine what the reality of both East and West might be. Why? The first two definitions embody the textual creation of the Orient while the latter definition illustrates how Orientalism has been deployed to execute authority and domination over the Orient. This is precisely what occurs when the Orientalist text is held to signify, to represent the truth: the Orient is rendered silent and its reality is revealed by the Orientalist. This may seem quite different, suggests Said, ‘from saying that all academic knowledge about India and Egypt is somehow tinged and impressed with, violated by, the gross political fact—and yet that is what I am saying in this study of Orientalism‘ (1978:11). Carrier, James (ed.) Source: Ashcroft, Bill, and D. Pal S. Ahluwalia. Edward Said‘s publication of Orientalism (1978) made such an impact on thinking about colonial discourse that for two decades it has continued to be the site of controversy, adulation and criticism. This definition is more expansive and can accommodate as diverse a group of writers as classical Greek playwright Aeschylus (524–455 BC), medieval Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265–1335), French novelist Victor Hugo (1802–85) and German social scientist and revolutionary Karl Marx (1818–83). Porter, D. (1983) ‘Orientalism and its problems’, in Peter Hulme, Margaret Iversen andDianne Loxley (eds) The Politics of Theory, Colchester: University of Essex. Orientalism is less preferred by specialists today, both because it is too vague and general and because it connotes the high-handed executive attitude of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century European The latest phase of Orientalism corresponds with the displacement of France and Britain on the world stage by the United States. In this highly-acclaimed work, Edward Said surveys the history and nature of Western attitudes towards the East, considering orientalism as a powerful European ideological creation - a way for writers, philosophers and colonial administrators to deal with the 'otherness' of eastern culture, customs and beliefs. Its aim is not to investigate the array of disciplines or to elaborate exhaustively the historical or cultural provenance of Orientalism, but rather to reverse the ‘gaze‘ of the discourse, to analyse it from the point of view of an ‘Oriental‘ —to ‘inventory the traces upon…the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so powerful a fact in the life of all Orientals’ (Said 1978:25). The term ‘Orientalism‘ is derived from ‘Orientalist‘, which has been associated traditionally with those engaged in the study of the Orient. The answer for Said is to be ‘sensitive to what is involved in representation, in studying the Other, in racial thinking, in unthinking and uncritical acceptance of authority and authoritative ideas, in the socio-political role of intellectuals, in the great value of skeptical critical consciousness‘ (1978:327). Edward Said: A Critical Reader, Oxford: Blackwell. The book is a complex articulation of how the absorptive capacity of Orientalism has been able to adopt influences such as positivism, Marxism and Darwinism without altering its central tenets. Following on from the notion of discourse we saw earlier (p. 14), colonial discourse is a system of statements that can be made about colonies and colonial peoples, about colonising powers and about the relationship between these two. Debates About Identity Are important. The point is that in each case the Oriental is contained and represented by dominating frameworks. Orientalism is a 1978 book by Edward W. Said, in which the author discusses Orientalism, defined as the West's patronizing representations of "The East"—the societies and peoples who inhabit the places of Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East. ——(1982a) ‘The question of Orientalism’, New York Review of Books 29(11): 49–56. He suggests that what French philosopher Voltaire (1694– 1778) in Candide and Spanish novelist Cervantes (1547–1616) in Don Quixote satirised was the assumption that the ̳swarming, unpredictable, and problematic mess in which human beings live can be understood on the basis of what books—texts—say‘ (1978:93). The creation of the Orient as the ‘other‘ is necessary so that the Occident can define itself and strengthen its own identity by invoking such a juxtaposition. The third definition of Orientalism as a corporate institution is demonstrative of its amorphous capacity as a structure used to dominate and authorize the Orient. Adams, P. (1997) ‘Interview with Edward Said’, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 17September. It is in the cultural sphere that the dominant hegemonic project of Orientalist studies, used to propagate the aims of imperialism, can be discerned. Thus, Orientalism, shares with magic and with mythology the self-containing, self-reinforcing character of a closed system, in which objects are what they are because they are what they are, for once, for all time, for ontological reasons that no empirical material can either dislodge or alter. Majid, A. Orang Timur hidup di dunia mereka dan kita (Barat) hidup di dunia kita sendiri. It requires the maintenance of rigid boundaries in order to differentiate between the Occident and the Orient. Said argues that this was to a large extent made possible by the ‘transference of a popular anti-Semitic animus from a Jewish to an Arab target…since the figure was essentially the same‘ (1978:286). Lewis, B. The belief that representations such as those we find in books correspond to the real world amounts to what Said calls a ‘textual attitude‘. Indeed, if this binary between ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’ were to disappear altogether, ‘we shall have advanced a little in the process of what Welsh Marxist cultural critic Raymond Williams has called the “unlearning” of “the inherent dominative mode” (1978:28). With this assertion we come right to the heart of Orientalism, and consequently to the source of much of the controversy it has provoked. Orientalism has a well-established meaning in English – namely, the scholarly study by Westerners of eastern cultures, languages and peoples, a meaning Edward Said sometimes adopts. As a style of thought it is ‘based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction‘ (1978:2) between the Orient and the Occident. The disciplines of modern Oriental studies, despite their sophistication, are inescapably imbued with the traditional representations of the nature of the Orient (especially the Middle East) and the assumptions that underlie the discourse of Orientalism. … (Rudyard Kipling) Introduction: Edward Said’s book, Orientalism (first published in 1978), is consistent with the very obvious frustration expressed by both common and wise men of east, some western scholars, who believe that the west has … The division of the world into East and West had been centuries in the making and expressed the fundamental binary division on which all dealing with the Orient was based. Certainly the decision by Warren Hastings, Governor-General of India in the 1770s, to conduct the Indian court system on the basis of Sanskrit law paved the way for the discoveries of William Jones, who helped translate the Sanskrit. Termen ”orientalism” syftar mycket riktigt på två olika saker – men de har en gemensam länk tillbaka till 1800-talets västeuropeiska maktuppsving. To the Westerner, according to Said, the Oriental was always like some aspect of the West; to some German Romantics, for example, Indian religion was essentially an Oriental version of Germano-Christian pantheism. al-Azm, S.J. 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? Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the Orient” and (most of the time) “the Occident.” Thus a very large mass of writers, “Orientalism is a rethinking of what has been considered an impassable gulf between East and West for centuries. Lewis, R. (1995) Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation, New York:Routledge. The very term ‘the Orient‘ holds different meanings for different people. 3 ini Said sampai kepada kesimpulan bahwa Timur itu adalah mereka, sang lain (the other) dan Barat adalah kita. Even powerful imaginative writers such as Gustav Flaubert, Gerard de Nerval or Sir Walter Scott were constrained in what they could either experience or say about the Orient. Tra i detrattori dell'interpretazione di Edward Said, si può annoverare il filosofo siriano Sadiq Jalal Al-Azm. die arabische Welt als einen „Stil der Herrschaft, Umstrukturierung und des Autoritätsbesitzes über den Orient“. Passion can be a confusing and unreflective element in intellectual debate, and while the passion no doubt explains a great deal about the popularity of Orientalism, the refusal by many critics to take the book‘s worldliness into account has tended to limit their perception of its significance. The three definitions as expounded by Said illustrate how Orientalism is a complex web of representations about the Orient. For the analysis hinges on the ideological nature of representation and the ways in which powerful representations become the ‘true‘ and accepted ones, despite their stereotypical and even caricatured nature. The idea that academic knowledge is ‘tinged‘, ‘impressed with‘, or ‘violated by‘ political and military force is not to suggest, as Dennis Porter supposes (1983), that the hegemonic effect of Orientalist discourse does not operate by ‘consent‘. This analysis of the binary nature of Orientalism has been the source of a great deal of criticism of the book, because it appears to suggest that there is one Europe or one West (one ‘us’) that constructs the Orient. Knowledge of the Orient, because it was generated out of this cultural strength, ‘in a sense creates the Orient, the Oriental and his world‘ (1978:40). Before the publication of Orientalism, the term ‘Orientalism‘ itself had faded from popular usage, but in the late 1970s it took on a renewed and vigorous life. Said‘s intervention is designed to illustrate the manner in which the representation of Europe‘s ‘others’ has been institutionalised since at least the eighteenth century as a feature of its cultural dominance. Tidigare hade Osmanska riket och barbareskstaterna i Nordafrika varit farliga och mäktiga grannar som västeuropeerna varit rädda för, men på 1800-talet vände vinden. The way we come to understand that ‘other‘ named ‘the Orient‘ in this binary and stereotypical way can be elaborated in terms of the metaphor of theatre. (1996) ‘Can the postcolonial critic speak? In this book, a Palestinian Arab living in America deploys the tools and techniques of his adopted professional location to discern the manner in which cultural hegemony is maintained. 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. But the crucial fact was that Orientalism, in all its many tributaries, began to impose limits upon thought about the Orient. Categories: Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, Postcolonialism, Tags: Analysis of Edward Said‘s Orientalism, Criticism of Edward Said‘s Orientalism, Edward Said, Edward Said‘s Orientalism, Edward Said‘s Orientalism Analysis, Edward Said‘s Orientalism Essay, Edward Said‘s Orientalism Notes, Edward Said‘s Orientalism Summary, Essay Edward Said‘s Orientalism, Eurocentric discourse, Occident and the Orient, Occidental studies, Orient and Occident, Orientalism, Postcolonialism, THE DISCOURSE OF ORIENTALISM. Pathak, Z., Sengupta, S. and Purkayastha, S. (1991) ‘The prisonhouse of Orientalism’,Textual Practice 5(2): 195–218. The Orient that Said discussed was basically the Middle East, and the Orientalism was the body of fact, opinion, and prejudice accumulated by western European scholars in their encounter… Read More ——(1993) Islam and the West, New York: Oxford University Press. Routledge, 2009. An essential feature of the discourse of Orientalism is the objectification of both the Orient and the Oriental. (1978:70). But if we see this homogenisation as the way in which the discourse of Orientalism simplifies the world, at least by implication, rather than the way the world is; the way a general attitude can link various disciplines and intellectual tributaries despite their different subject matter and modes of operation, we may begin to understand the discursive power of this pervasive habit of thinking and doing called Orientalism. Such power is connected intimately with the construction of knowledge about the Orient. One might add that it is a continually growing book, in that the analysis of the strategies of Orientalism has been useful in detecting the specific discursive and cultural operations of imperial culture in various ways. Yet the Orientalist makes it his work to be always converting the Orient from something into something else: he does this for himself, for the sake of his culture. The Orientalist representation has been reinforced not only by academic disciplines such as anthropology, history and linguistics but also by the ‘Darwinian theses on survival and natural selection’ (1978:227). Despite the shifting of the centre of power and the consequent change in Orientalising strategies, the discourse of Orientalism, in its three general modes, remains secure. Hence, Orientalism necessarily is viewed as being linked inextricably to colonialism. There is a video – tucked away somewhere deep in the attic of the internet – of me 15 years ago, convening an international conference on Edward Said’s book, Orientalism, at Columbia University. The issue of representation is crucial to understanding discourses within which knowledge is constructed, because it is questionable, says Said, whether a true representation is ever possible (1978:272). The provenance of the book demonstrates the deep repercussions of Orientalist discourse, for it emerges directly from the ‘disheartening‘ life of an Arab Palestinian in the West. Routledge, 2009. The reason Said can say this is because of his conviction of the worldliness of the discourse: ‘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‘ (1978:11). Both for critics and accolades, the book Orientalism by Edward Said has been monumental. Said‘s methodology therefore is embedded in what he terms ̳textualism‘, which allows him to envisage the Orient as a textual creation. Closer inspection would reveal that much of the most intensive Oriental scholarship was carried out in countries such as Germany, which had few colonial possessions. (1978:34). Said focused on the discipline of Oriental Studies in Europe, including philology, linguistics, The focus in this section is to look at the question of representation in order to illustrate the similarities in diverse ideas such as ‘Oriental despotism, Oriental sensuality, Oriental modes of production, and Oriental splendour‘ (1976:47). By means of this discourse, Said argues, Western cultural institutions are responsible for the creation of those ‘others‘, the Orientals, whose very difference from the Occident helps establish that binary opposition by which Europe‘s own identity can be established. Ashcroft, Bill, and D. Pal S. Ahluwalia. An integral part of Orientalism, of course, is the relationship of power between the Occident and the Orient, in which the balance is weighted heavily in favour of the former. In the first part Said establishes the expansive and amorphous capacity of Orientalism. The very term ‘Oriental‘ shows how the process works, for the word identifies and homogenises at the same time, implying a range of knowledge and an intellectual mastery over that which is named. The political orientation of his analysis can be seen by the importance he gives to Napoleon‘s invasion of Egypt in 1798. He recognises that there are a lot of individual scholars engaged in producing such knowledge. Lecturer in English PSC Solved Question Paper, Analysis of Thomas De Quincey’s On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth, Analysis of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Edward Said. (1978:40). Here the paramount obligation of the intellectual is to resist the attractions of the ‘theological‘ position of those implicated in the tradition of Orientalist discourse, and to emphasise a ‘secular‘ desire to speak truth to power, to question and to oppose. It occurs because the knowledge of ‘subject races‘ or ‘Orientals‘ makes their management easy and profitable; ‘knowledge gives power, more power requires more knowledge, and so on in an increasingly profitable dialectic of information and control‘ (1978:36). Orientalism is ‘the discipline by which the Orient was (and is) approached systematically, as a topic of learning, discovery and practice‘ (1978:73). This demonstrated that knowledge of any kind is always situated and given force by political reality. The Orientalism of today, both in its sensibility and in its manner of production, is not quite the same as the Orientalism Edward Said discussed forty years ago. For Said, nowhere is this better reflected than in the manner in which these legacies are manifested in American foreign policy. In time, the knowledge and reality created by the Orientalist discipline produces a discourse ‘whose material presence or weight, not the originality of a given author, is really responsible for the texts produced out of it‘ (1978:94). ‘[O]ne big division, as between West and Orient, leads to other smaller ones‘ (1978:58) and the experiences of writers, travellers, soldiers, statesmen, from Herodotus and Alexander the Great on, become ‘the lenses through which the Orient is experienced, and they shape the language, perception and form of the encounter between East and West‘ (1978:58). In this wide-ranging, intellectually vigorous study, Said traces the origins of "orientalism" to the centuries-long period during which Europe dominated the Middle and Near East and, from its position of power, defined "the orient" simply as "other than" the occident. Edward Said argued in his highly influential book Orientalism (1978) that western scholars were so contaminated by their European ideas and preconceptions that they could not deal honestly and fairly with Asian topics. The impact of Orientalism cannot be understated. Behdad, A. This section shows how the established legacies of British and French Orientalism were adopted and adapted by the United States. Kabbani, Rana (1986) Europe’s Myth of Empire, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. The Englishman in India or Egypt in the latter nineteenth century took an interest in those countries that was founded on their status as British colonies. Edward W. Said, Orientalism, Londres, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978. Dieses Denken drücke ein … It is a discourse that has been in existence for over two centuries and one that continues into the present. The web of racism, cultural stereotypes, political imperialism, dehumanizing ideology holding in the Arab or the Muslim is very strong indeed, and it is this web which every Palestinian has come to feel as his uniquely punishing destiny…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. (1978:63), In this way certain images represent what is otherwise an impossibly diffuse entity (1978:68). At the very least it creates a deep conflict in the consciousness of the colonised because of its clash with other knowledges about the world. Said's Orientalism deals with the Western structuring of the orient as "other". Orientalism and the Rushdie affair’,Cultural Critique, winter 1995–6: 5–42. In Orientalist discourse, the affiliations of the text compel it to produce the West as a site of power and a centre distinctly demarcated from the ‘other‘ as the object of knowledge and, inevitably, subordination. Since Said‘s analysis, Orientalism has revealed itself as a model for the many ways in which Europe‘s strategies for knowing the colonised world became, at the same time, strategies for dominating that world. The third part is an examination of ‘Modern Orientalism‘. It is the system of knowledge and belief about the world within which acts of colonisation take place. Hence, from an Orientalist perspective, the study of the Orient has been always from an Occidental or Western point of view. But it’s also the title of a book by Edward Said that reviews the effect of this belief system on the connections of Eastern and Western nations. Abrams's appearance in Orientalism is purposeful: for Said, Orientalism was an aspect of a ‘reconstituted theology’ that, like Abrams, he saw as the essence of Romanticism – an attempt to conceive of the human subject in ways that were mythic but ultimately secular (p. 65). Such was the vigour of the discourse that myth, opinion, hearsay and prejudice generated by influential scholars quickly assumed the status of received truth. Yet it is an intellectual matter of some very obvious importance. It is the geographical imagination that is central to the construction of entities such as the ‘Orient‘. Although it is generated within the society and cultures of the colonisers, it becomes that discourse within which the colonised may also come to see themselves (as, for example, when Africans adopt the imperial view of themselves as ‘intuitive‘ and ’emotional‘, asserting a distinctiveness from the ̳rational‘ and ‘unemotional‘ Europeans). This hidden political function of the Orientalist text is a feature of its worldliness and Said‘s project is to focus on the establishment of the Orient as a textual construct. Ultimately, the power and unparalleled productive capacity of Orientalism came about because of an emphasis on textuality, a tendency to engage reality within the framework of knowledge gained from previously written texts. The three are interrelated, particularly since the domination entailed in the third definition is reliant upon and justified by the textual establishment of the Orient that emerges out of the academic and imaginative definitions of Orientalism. What holds these experiences together is the shared sense of something ‘other‘, which is named ‘the Orient‘. (1978:27). Edward Said’s Orientalism is a treatise on the cultural construction that is Orientalism, which, far from merely an academic and scholarly discipline, is inextricably bound wit If I could I would make the entire world read this book, extremely relevant as its subject matter remains today. Here, Said sets out to establish how the main philological, historical and creative writers in the nineteenth-century drew upon a tradition of knowledge that allowed them textually to construct and control the Orient. Orientalism describes the various disciplines, institutions, processes of investigation and styles of thought by which Europeans came to ‘know‘ the ‘Orient‘ over several centuries, and which reached their height during the rise and consolidation of nineteenth-century imperialism. He urges continued vigilance in fighting the dominance of Orientalism. Orientalism, then, in its different phases, is a Eurocentric discourse that constructs the ‘Orient‘ by the accumulated knowledge of generations of scholars and writers who are secure in the power of their ‘superior‘ wisdom. To Said, the Orient and the Oriental are direct constructions of the various disciplines by which they are known by Europeans. Orientalism is an openly political work. Yet he is concerned about the ‘guild tradition‘ of Orientalism, which has the capacity to wear down most scholars. This textual attitude extends to the present day, so that, if Arab Palestinians oppose Israeli settlement and occupation of their lands, then that is merely ‘the return of Islam,‘ or, as a renowned contemporary Orientalist defines it, Islamic opposition to non-Islamic peoples, a principle of Islam enshrined in the seventh century.

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