Edward Said (1935-2003) was a Palestinian-American literary critic, political activist and social thinker whose work was profoundly influential in the area of post-colonial studies, a field he helped to define and develop. He is best known for his book, Orientalism (1978), which describes the "Orient" as Said believes Europeans and Americans understand it, and asks how this understanding came about, and in what ways it informs Western political domination of the Middle East and Asia. Orientalism here has at least two meanings. On the one hand, it denotes the field in which scholars of Eastern cultures, history and languages work. The book, in part, debunks that field. But the primary meaning the author has in mind is a history of strongly biased representations of Eastern (esp. Arabic and Middle Eastern) cultures produced by Westerners including-- but not limited to-- academics.
Whereas most books on colonialism before Orientalism had examined art, literature, philosophy and other cultural productions as expressions of preexisting prejudice, racism or negative ethnic stereotypes, Said turns that logic around and argues that it is through cultural discourses (e.g. travelogues, works of art, novels, films, philosophy etc. ) that the very category "The Orient" is brought into being. The "Orient" is not a description of a real time and place, but a "way of seeing and understanding" all people who live in the East (Middle East, Central Asia, South Asia and Far Eastern Asia). It is a Western social construction. According to Said, we first construct this wholly "Other" culture and then define ourselves against it as both superior and warranted in controlling it (the "Orient" ) for its own good.
Said writes at a very general level. He does not get into many of the usual political and economic details that often come up when discussing the middle east and Asia (and he concentrates mostly on the Middle East with an emphasis on Arabs, though he believes the "Orient" is a general construct which applies to India, China et al.). By examining cultural artifacts and texts, he argues that there is a remarkably static and monolithic set of traits that Westerners assign to the Orient which combines romantic and racist tropes at one and the same time. Here are a few examples of how he defines Orientalism as the "Other" and opposite of Western culture.
- The Orient is irrational; the West is rational.
-The Orient is mysterious and elusive; the West is clear-headed and direct.
-The Orient is feminine, it is more passive than active; the West is masculine, it acts on nature and other cultures rather than being passively acted upon like the East.
-The Orient has a fixed, unchanging essence and exotic aesthetic; The West is a dynamic, changing and progressive culture which is always advancing.
-Thus the Orient is a fascinating, adventurous, but too often a savage world but vastly inferior to our own, and it needs to be guided well, much as children need guidance and discipline. We can and should provide this "beneficial" domination.
Said is influenced profoundly by Michel Foucault, who holds that it is through discourse ("discurssive formations") that we constitute the social forms and mindsets ("epistemes")we inhabit. Thus, Said thinks that texts and cultural discourses actually invent the Orient. It is not, once again, a real time or place existing objectively, but a way of interpreting and representing whole cultures and peoples which justifies Western oppression of them. The production of these representations is largely an unconscious process and not a deliberate activity.
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Because of the highly abstract and general descriptions of Orientalism provided, one might well wonder whether other cultures don't have equally unflattering myths about, say, Europeans. Intellectual historian, Ian Buruma wrote a book along these lines, Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of its Enemies https://www.amazon.com/dp/B... Is it not the case (one might ask) that in-groups typically consider themselves superior to out-groups and produce "discourses" or myths and stereotypes that reflect poorly on others? Herodotus(Histories Bk. I) noted long ago that cultural groups often feel superior to groups in proportion to their cultural and geographic proximity. If we imagine other cultures in order of decreasing nearness and familiarity, said Herodotus, we tend to have the least sympathy for those which are most distant and least like our own. The ancient notion of the Chinese Empire as Tanxia (All that is under Heaven) articulated a similar world view that "centered on the Imperial court and went concentrically outward to major and minor officials and then the common citizens, tributary states, and finally ending with the fringe 'barbarians'." https://en.wikipedia.org/wi... Didn't Romans and Egyptians also conceive of themselves as the culmination of civilization? Did they not see their neighbors as inferiors? So, it may not be so unusual to produce prejudiced discourses about others that justify exploitation, hostilities, or at the very least chauvinism.
Another criticism that has been leveled at Said is that he does not go through the major works of any noted Orientalists. Bernard Lewis complained along such lines generating a heated exchange with Said prior to to the latter's death in 2003. Because Said makes his case on the basis of biased representations in art, travelogues, novels, etc., and because he was a literary critic by training and not a historian, not only Lewis but other historians that were trained Orientalists felt that he unfairly turned the word that stands for their discipline into a term of abuse. Indeed the term, Orientalism, is not used nearly as frequently as it was before the book in the descriptive sense.
However, if some Orientalists and historians were unhappy about the book, many anticolonial and postcolonial writers received it very positively. Indeed, Said (along with a few others such as Gayatri Spivak) is considered one of the founders of Postcolonial Studies, with its heavy emphasis on post-structuralist philosophies of Foucault and Derrida as well as neo-Marxian theorists like Antonio Gramsci. These are 3 of the strongest influences on Said's approach. In short, the book generated controversy, and to a lesser extent still does when it comes up today.
The following 3 minute video made by Al Jazeera nicely captures Said's concept of Orientalism.
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