Also, Said denounced the practice of Arab elites who internalized the American and British orientalists ideas of Arabic culture. Because it is a just cause, a noble ideal, a moral quest for equality and human rights.. You might hear the plucking of an oud, or a haunting voice singing in a double harmonic scale. These four categories are: Popular Image and Social Science Representation. All this has had unfortunate consequences. Edward Said, in full Edward Wadie Said, sometimes Edward William Said, (born November 1, 1935, Jerusalemdied September 25, 2003, New York, New York, U.S.), Palestinian American academic, political activist, and literary critic who examined literature in light of social and cultural politics and was an outspoken proponent of the political rights 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. After World War II, the European colonies were lost but the prejudice against the orientals continued. The Geocritical Legacies of Edward W. Said - Robert T. Tally Jr. 2015-01-07 Edward W. Said is considered one of the most influential literary and postcolonial theorists in the world. This created a certain fixed images about the orientals in the European minds. Secondly, Orientalism was actually more about defining itself through the mirror of the East rather than it was about objectively studying it. For examples, the Arabs are defined as uncivilized people, Indians as superstitious and beggarly and Islam as the religion of the terrorists. European and American) scholarship, literature and cultural representation creates and reinforces a biased view of non-Western cultures. The Western people think that all Eastern societies are fundamentally similar sharing quite different and exotic characteristics. 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. Orientalism, while also extending its breadth to all that is not considered West (The Middle East, India, Russia, etc.). Hence it provides a reason for not taking the work of a huge number of scholars of the Middle East with the academic respect it deserves, even when, as in the case of most social scientists at least, their work has little or nothing to do with Orientalism, either in praise or blame. 2018 Middle East Institute All Rights Reserved | Accessibility Policy |Built by Social Driver. Satisfactory Essays. Said then explained the role of Orientalism in the above process: 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. According to this view, the Muslim mind is capable of only four out of eight human thought processes. Indeed, the Orient doesnt have a stable set of geographical bounds. The European Orientalists had keen interest in classical rather than contemporary periods of the Eastern culture. Said examines these works with reference to the social, political, and economic contexts from which they emerged. Orientalism often continues to be regarded as dangerous, perhaps in particular by those who have never read it. He says that with the spread of colonization, Europeans came in contact with underdeveloped and undeveloped countries of the east. As an Arab Palestinian educated in Palestine and Egypt (both of which were British colonies at the time), who then went on to an academic career in literature and postcolonial studies in the United States, Said always felt himself to be straddling the Eastern and Western parts of his identity. Local interests are Orientalist special interests, the central authority is the greatest interest of the imperial society as a whole.. 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. The Oriental is the person represented by such thinking. In the book, he described the practice of othering, the making of an identity of others. Thus they justified colonization and colonialism. 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. Here Said made a distinction between pure knowledge and political knowledge. The earlier orientalists were silent observers but the new orientalists took part in the routine day to day life of the orients. It also is worth noting that the personal tone of the book helped to make things even worse. Edward W. Said's Orientalism introduces the concept of Orientalism, a force that has shaped Western (Occidental) academic scholarship, cultural imagination and production, and public policy concerning the space known as the Orient. . 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. For Said, as it was for Foucault, knowledge is power. His definition is pithier in . 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. 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. This is the more significant as our own thinking contains either unexamined assumptions from the Orientalist period or, at the very least, questions which we cannot help students to answer properly because we do not know how to frame them or where to look for answers. Said also proposes a third definition of orientalism using an analysis in historical context. And so it has been ever since. As a result, these often racist or romanticised stereotypes create a worldview that justifies Western colonialism and imperialism. Critics use the personal and the political to muddy the waters, not only of Edwards critique itself but also of anyone who can reasonably, or unreasonably, be associated with it. 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. They said that the people of the East were too naive. He understood it as an interconnected system of institutions, policies, narratives and ideas. The Arabic text on the wall is pure gibberish.if(typeof ez_ad_units!='undefined'){ez_ad_units.push([[580,400],'elifnotes_com-mobile-leaderboard-1','ezslot_12',132,'0','0'])};__ez_fad_position('div-gpt-ad-elifnotes_com-mobile-leaderboard-1-0'); In Orientalism, Edward Said has used various derivatives of the word Orient which literally means the East, the direction from which the sun rises. Hello, Viewers! Here I come to the third meaning of Orientalism, which is something more historically and materially defined than either of the other two. 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. According to him, the East was viewed as a textual universe for the West. In 1967, Israel occupied the Palestine territories which forced Said to take political stance for the liberation of Palestine. Thus, this a priori knowledge set up the Orient as the antithesis of the West. By knowing the Orient, the Occident came to possess it. Said also makes it clear that he is not attempting to cover the whole area. Edward Said agrees with Disraeli who said that East is something more than just an idea without corresponding reality. It was Saids hope that his work would help break the bonds that Orientalism has held and is holding over the subaltern world. Said argues that by minimising the rich diversity of Southwest Asian and North African peoples, Orientalists turn them into a contrasting image against which the West seems culturally superior. The West uses the word in its relation to the East. Said demonstrated how policy makers seek out the specialist, in this case the Orientalists, to shape their policies. One of these occurred during a 1979 trip in which I presented Edwards ideas to the members of the Israeli Oriental Society. Related: A Brief Summary of Orientalism by Edward Said. Edward Said also described 'Orientalism' as a discourse, a definition he takes from the French philosopher and historian, Michel Foucault. What does it mean? But Orientalist perceptions didnt simply disappear after the colonial period. To justify these claims, they put forward Darwins theory of Evolution. They romanticized the oriental land and their behavior. Edward Said himself was well aware of what we were attempting via our Review of Middle East Studies having had his attention drawn to it by Fred Halliday, a very important figure in my story. The theme that Said spent the most time developing and producing examples in Orientalism was the idea that Orientalism was not the objective field of study it claimed to be. 848 Words. In chapter 3 of the book, Edward Said discusses Orientalism Now. He starts off by telling how the geography of the world was shaped by the colonization of the Europeans. 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. Orientalism has been translated into 36 languages (as of 2003) and remains a classic available in most bookstores. Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles. Edward Saids Orientalism is his most celebrated work that hit the stalls in 1978. Orientalism served as an ideological basis for French and British colonial rule. It is this policy, by which, he says that contemporary scholars try to perpetuate the traditions set by European Orientalists. For this purpose, he reviews the careers of leading Islamicists of that time like French scholar Lovis Massignon and the English historian Hamilton Gibb. While the Orientalist scholars were the seers, the observers, the students, and the subject. 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. is used academically to signify Western doctrines and theses about the. For all the books that castigate the malign influence of the State Department Arabists, none to my knowledge point to the policy impact of Israeli Orientalists as well as to the fact that, even in Israeli terms, their close association with the countrys defense establishment has been counter-productive to what might be described as the countrys national interests. Said used his fame to further the cause of Palestine and advocate human rights. Said finds the following dogmas implicit in the works of Grunchbaun and other such Orientalists: Absolute difference between the Occident (rational and superior), and the Orient (aberrant and inferior). She likes reading research-informed books that distill the workings of the human brain/mind/consciousness and thinking of ways to apply the insights to her own life. To this he adds the presumption of the president of the Middle East Studies Association that since the Arab language is much given to rhetoric, the Arabs are consequently incapable of true thought.. This shows that despite globalization and awareness about the world, the bias persisted among the people of developed countries. Orientalism is Edward Saids most influential work. Growing up, however, she found herself transitioning to non-fiction, psychological, and self-help books. According to Said, the knowledge or understanding gained through the Orients scientific study leads directly to control and power over the Orient. 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. 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, and the aversion of the Muslim from the thought process of rationalism, referring to Islam as. 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. 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. They found their cultures exotic and full of queerness. In Foucaults view, knowledge is power and also the way of gaining power. However, this appeared to be highly unlikely, as no scholar had been able to do this so far. They regarded the orientals as backward, uncivilized and violent. He seems to be motivated by Foucaults notion of a discourse. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. that artists are by definition free spirits, and (b) that it is uncommon to read Shakespeare as an historian of Rome. Said deplores that the modern Orient has fallen for the bait and is participating in its own Orientalizing. While the US Department of State has justified the unilateral sanctions as a means to deprive [Bashar al-Assads] regime of the resources it needs to continue violence against civilians, the sanctions have disproportionately affected the civilian population in Syria. He names names Bernard Lewis in particular. ORIENTALISM, by Edward Said. Nevertheless, for a number of reasons, while Edward could commend us for working, as he put it, in disciplines not fields, I do not think he had any real understanding of what practicing these disciplines actually involved. Under the subtitle The Last Phase, Edward Said reviews Post-War II Orientalism as the United States came to be the center of activity with regard to the East. if(typeof ez_ad_units!='undefined'){ez_ad_units.push([[336,280],'elifnotes_com-box-4','ezslot_2',158,'0','0'])};__ez_fad_position('div-gpt-ad-elifnotes_com-box-4-0'); Edward Said, in his book, adopts a continental interdisciplinary approach to literary criticism, using the principles of phenomenology, existentialism and French structuralism to trace out the connections between literature and politics. Palestine 1935. They were not clever, witty, diplomatic or far-sighted like Europeans. Saids reply to this conundrum and to Spivak is that the subaltern could indeed speak. For example, they believed that Arabs were cruel and violent, Japanese were always associated with karate and Muslims were always considered terrorists. Besides, a field can change so entirely, in even the most traditional disciplines like philology, history or theology, as to make an all-purpose definition of subject matter almost impossible. 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. They divided the world into two parts with the concept of ours and theirs. 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. This academic discipline, in Said's view, was primarily an expression of colonial domination. 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. The West was Christian where the Orient was Islamic; its people were Nordic where those of the Orient were Semitic; it was liberal, democratic, and rational where the Orient was backward, despotic, and emotional. Developing alongside this power, giving legitimacy and traction, was the scholar of the Orient, the Orientalists. Orientalist ideas, stereotypes and approaches have been renewed and reiterated over the past two centuries, and we can still see them in circulation today. Keep reading for Edward Said's answer to the question: what is Orientalism? The western people thought of orientals as feminine, weak and yet strangely dangerous because they pose a threat to white, western women. 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. This was totally illogical artificial distinction. These constructs imagined Eastern societies as fundamentally similar and sharing the characteristics that are not possessed by Western societies. Orientalism by Edward Said is a canonical text in which he challenges the concept of Orientalism and the difference between east and west. New York: Pan-theon Books, 1978. xvi + 328 pages. He also attempts to trace it by describing a set of devices usually common to the works of popular artists, poets, and scholars. For example, the religion of Christ was Christianity, so they called Islam as Mohammadism. They contrast themselves with the others, the orientals. He focuses on how American, English, and French scholars have approached the Arab societies of the Middle East and North Africa. The Europeans generalized attributes of the oriental people and began to portray them through their scientific reports, media sources and literary works. This knowledge is a paraphrase of . Nevertheless, Said stated that, it is fairly recent that Orientalism has become a science or an extended body of knowledge and tradition. Said admits that his understanding of orientalism is based on personal dimension as he had witnessed the prejudices of the Westerners towards the orient. Besides being the Founder and Owner of this website, I am a Government Officer. Read more: He was a German Orientalists who entertained an almost virulent dislike for Islam. During this period, transformation took place relating to philology and social science. One is Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetile-Duperron and the other is William Jones. 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. Think of those who argued that the Shia population could be lured into playing an anti-PLO, anti-Syrian role in South Lebanon. For example, they attributed the qualities like laziness, irrationality, uncivilizedness and crudeness to Orientals. She has a degree in Psychology and a deep passion for the subject. Seeing the links between culture, knowledge and power is fundamental to understanding the reach of Orientalism. means a person who studies or writes about the Orient. We should continue to challenge the ways Orientalism shapes our perception of Southwest Asia and North Africa countries and peoples. The impact of Orientalism is monumental. 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. It is the field of writing, research and teaching about the orient. 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 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. ' Orientalism' by Edward Said is a canonical text in which he challenges the concept of Orientalism and the difference between east and west.
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