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However, prior to the colonial era, Orientalism was a literary discourse bound in a tradition of writers, texts, research, and conceptualizations. The peoples of the Middle East are often portrayed as weak, barbaric and irrational. It is important to see Edward Said's work, and the mixed reception it received, in the round. Sign up to receive the latest publications, event invitations, and our weekly newsletter delivered to your inbox. 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. The vision of Orient, Said stated that, existed as far back as the ancient Greeks. Orientalism, while also extending its breadth to all that is not considered West (The Middle East, India, Russia, etc.). Related: A Brief Summary of Orientalism by Edward Said. One of these occurred during a 1979 trip in which I presented Edwards ideas to the members of the Israeli Oriental Society. Geopolitically Orient signifies the Middle East, Asia and the Far East, territories that were once a part of one or another European Empire. 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. This knowledge is a paraphrase of . 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. Its important to note that, for Said, Orientalism isnt just a set of myths. The Concept of Other and Alter Ego in Saids Orientalism, 2. Orientalism by Edward Said: In a Nutshell, A Brief Summary of Orientalism by Edward Said, Various Flaws and Weaknesses in Edward Saids Orientalism, Orientalism & Technology: A Primer on the Techno-Orientalism Debate, Foundational Essay: Saids Knowing the Oriental, Edward said: Biography, Orientalism Theory & Postcolonialism, A Brief Summary of Orientalism by Edward W. Said, Edward Saids Orientalism: Various Flaws and Weaknesses, Coleridges Treatment Of The Supernatural In His Major Poems, Coleridge as a Poet: Analysis of Main Features of his Poetry, Frost at Midnight by Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Summary & Analysis, Significance of the Wedding-Guest in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Interesting Facts About Gothic Literature You Must Know, 20 Most Famous Classic Gothic Novels That Will Intrigue You With Their Horror Stories. Keep reading for Edward Saids answer to the question: what is Orientalism? 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. Later, he studied at Harvard and wrote his Ph.D. thesis on Joseph Conrad. A Complex Relation Between Power and Knowledge Another . 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). As an adjective the word qualifies anything belonging to the East e.g. 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. One is Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetile-Duperron and the other is William Jones. Read more: She has a degree in Psychology and a deep passion for the subject. According to him, the East was viewed as a textual universe for the West. Edward Said's most prominent work 'Orientalism (1978)' which set the foundation for post-colonial theory, focuses mainly on The Middle East and Arab nations. Orientalism by Edward Said is a canonical text in which he challenges the concept of Orientalism and the difference between east and west. They regarded the orientals as backward, uncivilized and violent. Wikimedia. 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. 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. These policies often involved the domination of those that the specialist studies and thus demonstrated Said and Foucaults conception of knowledge as power. Said begins this chapter with a discussion of Orientalism in the 1920s and 1930s. Edward Said put forward several definitions of Orientalism in the introduction of his book, , Edward Said builds up his argument and analysis in three (3) long chapters. Said pointed out The Persians by Aeschylus as an example of early attempts to create an Orient. He also attempts to show the extent to which these representations permeate the Western culture. 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. 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. These tropes form a part of what Palestinian-American intellectual and activist Edward Said called Orientalism. This knowledge is a paraphrase of . They established the science of orientalism from the western angle. 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. The concept of Orientalism was coined by the late Edward Said, a Palestinian-American academic who founded the discipline of Postcolonial Studies. His seminal 1978 book of the same name explores the ways Western experts, or Orientalists, have come to understand and represent the Middle East. Edward Said's Definition of 'Orientalism' as a Discourse. The one sided struggle is mainly due to American identification with Zionism. The Middle East Institute (MEI) is an independent, non-partisan, non-for-profit, educational organization. Some of her favorites include Thinking, Fast and Slow, How We Decide, and The Wisdom of the Enneagram. 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. Said also proposes a third definition of orientalism using an analysis in historical context. 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. 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). But, as a pattern of knowledge, it preceded colonialism. Oriental is a noun-form which means an individual or people of the Orient. The orient refers to eastern (most often colonized nations), most notably the Middle East and all of Asia. | Find, read and cite all the research . Here, TikTokers collaboratively satirise features commonly found in Hollywood films about the Middle East, such as Beirut (2018), American Sniper (2014), and Argo (2012). 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.. This shows that despite globalization and awareness about the world, the bias persisted among the people of developed countries. This was totally illogical artificial distinction. Said provides a review of pre-18th century writing on the Muslim near East, and socio-political impact of Napoleons invasion of Egypt in 1798. The ideologies and practices of Orientalism were originally theorized by Edward Said through his 1978 book . These constructs imagined Eastern societies as fundamentally similar and sharing the characteristics that are not possessed by Western societies. Edward Said agrees with Disraeli who said that East is something more than just an idea without corresponding reality. According to Said, the key insight is that Orientalism does not reflect objective truth. Orientalism is a term that was coined by the late academic Edward Said. Political and social ideas that were manipulated and implanted by the British mainly dominating the East during colonization. Portrayals in popular culture influence the framing of news about Southwest Asia and North Africa, and vice versa. Is this book an argument only against something, and not for something positive? 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. Thus, this a priori knowledge set up the Orient as the antithesis of the West. For examples, the Arabs are defined as uncivilized people, Indians as superstitious and beggarly and Islam as the religion of the terrorists. The West exploited these representations to justify their imperialist policies in the Middle East. These constructs imagined Eastern societies as fundamentally similar and sharing the characteristics that are not possessed by Western societies. He bases his argument on the work of Gustave von Grunchbaun. For example, they believed that Arabs were cruel and violent, Japanese were always associated with karate and Muslims were always considered terrorists. The Europeans generalized attributes of the oriental people and began to portray them through their scientific reports, media sources and literary works. In his book, Edward Said clearly stated that Orientalism was not the product of colonial rule. What is the main argument of Edward Said book Orientalism? According to Said, the Orient is a semi-mythical construct imposed on a set of countries east of Europe. . Europeans claimed that they were a superior race to the people of the east. Said pointed out. In this speech, Lord Balfour clearly justified Britains presence and involvement in Egypt. It is important to see Edward Saids work, and the mixed reception it received, in the round. ' Said argued that his distinction emphasized the supremacy of the Occident versus the inferiority of the Orient. It was and is hardly possible for 2+2=4 to enable the domination of another group. Edward Said substantially invented both the term Orientalism and the field of postcolonial studies. This essentialist thinking was a false way of viewing people groups and their culture. 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. 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). The Orient became the seen, the observed, the studied, and the object. 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. Like the Orient, this term reduces a variety of peoples to a discrete set of traits and temperaments. He was a German Orientalists who entertained an almost virulent dislike for Islam. However, this appeared to be highly unlikely, as no scholar had been able to do this so far. Even if the inequalities and conflicts from which my interest in Orientalism as a cultural and political phenomenon have arisen have not disappeared, today we have at least reached consensus on the idea that this does not represent an immutable situation, but rather a historical experience whose end (or at least the partial overcoming of which) can be at hand., In memory of a Great Public Intellectual by Hala Abuateya, Remembrance for Memory by Stathis Gourgouris, On the Attacks on Edward Said by Francis Boyle. Your email address will not be published. So, a discourse is the product of interaction between power and knowledge interconnected in a never-ending circle. Said argued that Orient and Occident worked as antithetical terms. These translations were actually based on the assumptions that a truly effective colonial conquest required knowledge of the conquered people. Justifications for sanctions in Syria (pictured, 2019) have roots in Orientalist ideas. During this period, transformation took place relating to philology and social science. They were not clever, witty, diplomatic or far-sighted like Europeans. They thought it was the duty of the colonizers to educate and civilize them. Their emphasis was no longer on the description of the exotic but rather on the comprehension of it. . Orientalists might write about countries as varied as Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq with little distinction. Id love to hear from you. The construction of the Orient portrayed a negative inversion of the Western culture. means a person who studies or writes about the Orient. Said also claimed a subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic people and their culture. EDWARD W. SAID 163 most committed partisans- usually scholars, professors, experts, and the like- claim it is. 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. The author himself, his reasons for writing the book, his genuine offense at the way Arabs and Muslim are objectified in such a reductionist way, is powerfully present in the text. Edward Said's Definition of 'Orientalism' as a Discourse. Said examines these works with reference to the social, political, and economic contexts from which they emerged. Said demonstrated how policy makers seek out the specialist, in this case the Orientalists, to shape their policies. that artists are by definition free spirits, and (b) that it is uncommon to read Shakespeare as an historian of Rome. Said carefully examines what he calls 'Orientalism' in an attempt to show how different cultures view each other . He says that with the spread of colonization, Europeans came in contact with underdeveloped and undeveloped countries of the east. 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. 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. After the First World War, the centre of orientalism moved from Europe to the USA. His family was exiled from Mandate Palestine during the 1948 Nakba, and he went on to live in Lebanon, Egypt and the United States. 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. Instead, it is an invention of the Western mind. Read more: Said's theory of postcolonialism specifically brought into consideration the false image of the Orient (East). Edward Said also described 'Orientalism' as a discourse, a definition he takes from the French philosopher and historian, Michel Foucault. Thus, this a priori knowledge set up the Orient as the antithesis of the West. Nevertheless, viewed from the perspective of modern Middle East studies, the present and the future look surprisingly good, with the ever expanding production of highly skilled graduate students around the world well-supplied with the tools not just to make use of whatever data the field contains but also to use their knowledge of the various social science disciplines to challenge the conventional wisdom and the old paradigms which continue to stand in the way of a proper understanding of how Middle Eastern societies, economies, and political systems really work. Said used the word the other to describe the Western fascination towards the orient. The West exploited these representations to justify their imperialist policies in the Middle East. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading. , the direction from which the sun rises. Keep reading for Edward Said's answer to the question: what is Orientalism? For example, the racist discourse and dogmas of Earnest Renan in the 1840s. They romanticized the oriental land and their behavior. Orientalist ideas, stereotypes and approaches have been renewed and reiterated over the past two centuries, and we can still see them in circulation today. For this purpose, he reviews the careers of leading Islamicists of that time like French scholar Lovis Massignon and the English historian Hamilton Gibb. 842 Words4 Pages. Edward Said's Definition Of Orientalism. Remember the solidarity shown to Palestine here and everywhere and remember also that there is a cause to which many people have committed themselves, difficulties and terrible obstacles notwithstanding. Once a tradition of superior values of the West and a static view of the Orient developed, the tradition crystalized. He was a humanist through and through, seeing the world via the optic of literature, music, and the arts, not by the use of supposedly value-free economics, political science, or sociology. Orientalism is a hegemonic discourse for Said: these essentialist assumptions of Western superiority over Eastern cultures serve the ruling world powers and are manifested throughout all forms of discourse including literature, research and conversation both due to, and in order to, perpetuate the power of these dominant groups. Said deplores that the modern Orient has fallen for the bait and is participating in its own Orientalizing. The political powers picked up this thread and used it to justify their colonial expansion. 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. He says that this thought process was deliberately created by the colonizers in the minds of western society to justify their act of colonialism. This created a certain fixed images about the orientals in the European minds. a manner of regularized writing, vision and study, dominated by imperatives, perspectives and ideological biases ostensibly suited to the orient.. Foucault defined discourse as a system of thought that governs the knowledge obtained by a person. 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. The term Oriental was often used to describe any person or group of people east of Europe, usually from Arab and/or Islamic countries. Orientalist means a person who studies or writes about the Orient. But as a group of related disciplines Orientalism was, in important ways, about Europe itself, and hinged on arguments that circulated around the issue of national distinctiveness, and racial and linguistic origins. For example, the religion of Christ was Christianity, so they called Islam as Mohammadism. 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. They did not know how to deal with the cruel world. Edward Said winds up his discussion of Orientalism by briefly addressing the positive side to the problem of reliable scholarship in the field of Orientalism. Thus, what is necessary is for each people group to speak for itself and create discourses of its own history. So, in a very basic sense, knowledge is power. According to him, they helped to perpetuate the dynamics of Orientalism in their representation of Islam and Arabs in four categories. 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. However, [humans] make their own history and every society is in a constant state of flux and development. 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. Still, he employs them because this is how the argument has been framed by the Orientalists. In 1975-76, Said was a fellow at the center for Advanced Study at Stanford University. It has been influential in about half a dozen established disciplines, especially literary studies (English, comparative. Bad Orientalism encourages the notion that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. In 1993, he published his most comprehensive works on Post Colonial study Culture and Imperialism and Representations of The Intellectual. . It is difficult to be precise about the answer to the question what is Orientalism? Edward Said uses the term in three interdependent senses: 1) Orientalism as a scholarly discipline, 2) Orientalism as a mode of thought based on the essential East-West divide, and 3) Orientalism as a political ideology. Secondly, Orientalism was actually more about defining itself through the mirror of the East rather than it was about objectively studying it. What Is Orientalism? Friday essay: how the West betrayed Syria. PDF | Edward Said remained a little-known scholar both in the West and in the Arab World until the publication of his major work, Orientalism, in 1978,. Sign up for a free trial here . This period is characterized with great colonial expansion into the Orient, culminating in the second world war. Edward Said was a great scholar and an important figure in Post-Colonial studies. Therefore, through Orientalism, the West took it upon itself to represent the Orient and by doing so opened it to exploitation. Middle East Institute 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. Inevitably, this alternative project proved to be much more difficult for reasons Edward himself could not anticipate and for which his own critique shares a small part of the blame. Thus they justified colonization and colonialism. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. The author looks deeply into the opinions and propaganda that were fueled into the East by the colonial powers that governed the continent. Think of expert authorities like Gabriel Baer, who assured me, in the mid-1970s, that Egypt would never make peace with Israel. In this latest phase, the highly qualified American area specialists took the lead replacing the earlier philologists. You might hear the plucking of an oud, or a haunting voice singing in a double harmonic scale. They projected the orientals to the Western World in romantic and mythological manner. He mentioned two 18th century intellectuals who spearheaded the transition of Orientalism from literary to scientific knowledge. In 1967, Israel occupied the Palestine territories which forced Said to take political stance for the liberation of Palestine. 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. 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. These four categories are: Popular Image and Social Science Representation. Said used his fame to further the cause of Palestine and advocate human rights. First, while Orientalism presents itself as an objective field of study, it was used to justify the political domination of the East by the West. For example, they attributed the qualities like laziness, irrationality, uncivilizedness and crudeness to Orientals. The European Orientalists had keen interest in classical rather than contemporary periods of the Eastern culture. Edward Said also rejects the validity of the terms Orient and Occident. Orientalism is a cultural and political phenomenon and not just an empty abstraction. It is a mirror image of the inferior, the alien (other) to the Occident (West). Said notes that there has been a fair amount of interchange over the last few centuries over these two theoretical fields of coming to terms with the Orient. 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. While media literacy about Orientalism is increasing, these tropes remain as relevant as ever in the Western popular imagination. The 2018 film Beirut was shot mostly in Tangier in Morocco: part of the reason it received backlash for its inaccurate, Orientalist depiction of the Lebanese Civil War and 1982 Israeli invasion. He also highlights their efforts to encourage the Easterners to judge themselves by Western criteria and to work for achieving the Western goals. The Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture. Said is often credited with founding the field known as postcolonial studies, and his work has significantly influenced fields across the humanities: including cultural studies, anthropology, comparative literature and political science. 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.. For a listing of MEI donors, please click here. 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. He bases his argument on the work of Gustave von Grunchbaun. 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. He refers to Lacans terminology which describes the mirror stage of development. Edward Said first published Orientalism in 1978 and the book has continued to open readers' eyes to the true effects of biased thought. These bonds were to be broken by new studies of each cultures history and experience by the respective cultures. It is detailed work that makes a tremendous influence on modern thinking and outlook about the orient.