Impressions on “Orientalism” by Said
In his book Orientalism*, Edward Said expresses harsh critics to the view the Western world has had (and quite frankly generally still has) on the Orient. (*I have to mention I only read the introduction and Chapter one, but it certainly makes me want to read the whole book).
Said focuses his study on the British, French (two important colonial empires) and American experiences of the Arabic world and Islam. Before starting his analysis, he adresses the methodology issue ; a section that can be quite useful to study a text using a cultural or postcolonial approach. The principal methodological devices he uses are strategic location and strategic formation. The first one refers to the position an author has in relation to the Orient ; the previous knowledge he has, the voice and type of structure he adopts, the images and themes he develops.
Another aspect of methodology is that Said’s analysis focuses on evidence (found in style, figures of speech, narrative devices, historical circumstances, etc.) for representations as such not as natural protrayals of the Orient. Said believes, unlike Foucault, that the author has an specific imprint.
Said analyses a 1910 discourse of James Balfour, a British man who occupied various political functions. Although Balfour pretends not to take an attitude of superiority and claims that it is not a question of superiority and inferiority, his discourse says implicitely otherwise. Balfour states that it is a good thing that the British control the government in Egypt, since they never showed the capacity for self-government.
This discourse reminds me of the novel Cannibale by Didier Daeninckx. The novel takes place in Paris during the 1931 Colonial Exposition and explores colonialism. Just like in Balfour’s discourse, the themes of knowledge and power dominate the text. Firstly, it is a given that the White Man – the colonizer – knows more than the poor uncivilised colonized. The exposition shows how France brings Western civilisation – the only valuable one – to these Savages. The exposition’s participants are placed in cages and reenact what they do in their home country ; these activities and traditions can only be seen not as different, but as inferior. Since the West has more knowledge and kindly transfers it to these people, it follows that the power falls in the hands of the White Man. In the text, aboriginal people from a colony necessarely become criminals as they leave the cage in which they were asked to ‘perform’. Never the question of if they did something wrong was raised, they were seen as prisoners who escaped. Never were they offered to defense themselves, they were silenced since they belonged to the Colonizer.
Foucault (by any other name)
Foucault seems to be saying: Well the author really isn’t all that dead, or at least s/he has come back as the author function. Foucault is perhaps calling for a rebellion against that author function, because it is limiting, but in the meantime he wants to point out how that fiction is used. (It may be useful to have the opinion of a writer, Elizabeth Gilbert, who evaluates the burden of the author function. She confirms to some extent Foucault’s analysis.)
I am particularly interested in Foucault’s analysis of the author’s name, which to my mind is should not be analysed as a proper noun but as a common noun. Foucault seems to be surprised that the proper noun Shakespeare does mean the same when it becomes the name of the author of a set of works (we can say: pass me your Shakespeare). This is true, because in the case of the authorial function we are talking about Shakespearean works, not Shakespeare. The meaning of the common noun or the adjective derived from it will change depending on the class of objects it designates. “Fish” is not quite the same word if it includes whales or not. So it is with Shakespeare-author and Shakespearean. It feels like Foucault reveals a false mystery — like analyzing the surprising fact that eyelids open right where there are eyes. It is just how bodies work normally.
Forever Anonymously? Inventing our Other Selves
I would like to start with a few conclusions of the readings we have done so far. It seems the subject is dead. We have gone from the author as individual creator of the text, to a decentering of the subject, and finally the death of the author. I have no difficulty with the notion that authors are created by other texts. Authors do not write in a vacuum; they write as members of an historic moment of a particular society to which we can never return. Therefore, the author as she/he was at the time of writing is dead, but I don’t think we can eliminate the writer completely from the equation. I see the position of the author as somewhat synechdocical: the individual whose identity is always in flux represents society or a collective subconscious that is also always altering and vice versa. Human beings experience the world individually through the body and the psyche, and these experiences collectively produce societies, which in turn affect individual lives differently.
In other words because subjects, texts and readers are always in a process of becoming, they cannot be given a fixed identity or meaning. In this sense, they/we are part of the continuous performance of the sign – ad infinitum.
The author is not dead.
Recognizing the Other and Examining Hegemonic Relationships
In Orientalism, Edward Said defines Orientalism as “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient”, and argues that Western cultural identity developed by distinguishing itself from the Orient as if the latter were a second, inferior self. He further claims that in Western academia Orientalist doctrines continue to reinforce essentialist views of the Orient that imagine an ontological and epistemological distinction between the West and the East. As a result, Orientalism has come to represent a hegemonic relationship in which the binary of East versus West serves as a Western “corporate institution” for control over a fictitious East. This imagined East nevertheless exists in a very real form as a relationship between Occident and Orient based on power, domination and complex hegemony. Said cites Gramsci’s idea of cultural hegemony in civil society, where the influence of Orientalist ideas persists by consent rather than imposition, to explain the continued strength of Orientalism as a system of discourse. He calls for a new discursive strategy that recognizes the individuality of nations while impartially examining the general hegemonic relationships between states.
Possible Problems with the text, Orientalism:
- Most importantly for me, Said does not write a lot about the resistance of the colonized Other. What about the resisting subject as part of colonial discourse? The colonized nations occupy a non-static space in colonial history from which they have articulated resistance thereby forcing the colonizer to respond in different ways. Does he have a theory of resistance?
- This brings me to the ways in which the marginalized have resisted their oppression. While not sufficient to counterbalance hegemonic texts, they have always had their own texts. Also, whether through corridos, Yoruba chants or rap, they have challenged the West by making use of the spoken word. (Don’t forget visual art, theatre, music, etc…) In other words, the colonized subjects have a conception of themselves that is outside of the Orientalist panopticon.
- Has the binary opposition between West and East always been a fixed feature of Western discourse? Is history not a little bit more complicated? I am thinking, for example, of the French vs. English relationship with their colonial subjects, and the savage vs. the noble savage etc… Said seems to homogenize the West. However, you can argue that despite the differences within hegemonic discourse, the ‘other’ is always inferior.
- Said does not discuss in detail the role of capitalist expansion in the creation of Orientalist texts. In other words, aside from the literary canon of the West, other forces contributed to the creation of the inferior Other.
In sum, while I see the very obvious logic in Said’s argument, perhaps colonial power was not always imposed from above. The more nuanced history of colonization suggests that hegemonic discourse originated from various sources above, below, inside and outside many discourses of power and resistance. Which brings me to . . .
The Anonymous Babble
Foucault’s position regarding knowledge and power informs Said’s theory of Orientalism. As we have seen, the position of the author as the sole source of meaning is challenged from Saussure, Lacan and Althusser to Derrida for whom language constructs or invents the subject. So for Said the Western texts of a variety of disciplines produce knowledge about the Orient that constructs the Other. However, while Said seems to focus on individual Western authors whose works have collectively contributed to Orientalist power structures, Foucault denies the existence of ‘true’ authors. Furthermore, although he welcomes the shift in focus (a la Barthes) from writer to text, he challenges the notion of a work per se which attributes a false coherence to individual works.
Barthes may have claimed that the author is dead, but Foucault explains that the name of an author functions differently at different moments in history, proving that cultural norms determine our understanding of the author’s connection to a particular text.
Foucault’s association of a text’s recognition of ownership with prohibition and punishment, for example, points to how relationships of power are inherent in socio-political and cultural discourse.
Moreover, he claims that names such as Freud and Marx are “founders of discursivity” in that their writings are perpetually modified to inform new discursive practices, unlike scientific texts whose original authority remains unchallenged. In other words, Freud and Marx are the invisible originators of ever-changing discourses, which modify the original discursive practice as they return to it. (But what are they returning to? When we discuss Freud’s psychoanalysis, what are we discussing?) Thus for Foucault, eliminating the study of an author will allow a more objective analysis of how the text ‘performs’ reality/ies.
Final thoughts:
According to Foucault, the only subject is language itself. He is interested in how the text operates within a culture (mostly European it seems). This is wonderful for interdisciplinary studies and coincides with Said’s notion of Orientalist texts that come from a variety of disciplines. However, if there is no subject, no self, then individual voices of ‘othered’ societies have no agency.
Therefore, while I can see how the Orientalist vision in texts has constructed unequal power relations between peoples, I think that the world has always been made up of more than the two cardinal directions (East and West). Also, texts are produced by societies and individuals alike, the Palestinian-American intellectual voice of Edward Said writing of Orientalism, or that of the African-American feminist, bell hooks, on transgender, for example.
Forever Anonymously? Inventing our Other Selves
I would like to start with a few conclusions of the readings we have done so far. It seems the subject is dead. We have gone from the author as individual creator of the text, to a decentering of the subject, and finally the death of the author. I have no difficulty with the notion that authors are created by other texts. Authors do not write in a vacuum; they write as members of an historic moment of a particular society to which we can never return. Therefore, the author as she/he was at the time of writing is dead, but I don’t think we can eliminate the writer completely from the equation. I see the position of the author as somewhat synechdocical: the individual whose identity is always in flux represents society or a collective subconscious that is also always altering and vice versa. Human beings experience the world individually through the body and the psyche, and these experiences collectively produce societies, which in turn affect individual lives differently.
In other words because subjects, texts and readers are always in a process of becoming, they cannot be given a fixed identity or meaning. In this sense, they/we are part of the continuous performance of the sign – ad infinitum.
The author is not dead.
Recognizing the Other and Examining Hegemonic Relationships
In Orientalism, Edward Said defines Orientalism as “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient”, and argues that Western cultural identity developed by distinguishing itself from the Orient as if the latter were a second, inferior self. He further claims that in Western academia Orientalist doctrines continue to reinforce essentialist views of the Orient that imagine an ontological and epistemological distinction between the West and the East. As a result, Orientalism has come to represent a hegemonic relationship in which the binary of East versus West serves as a Western “corporate institution” for control over a fictitious East. This imagined East nevertheless exists in a very real form as a relationship between Occident and Orient based on power, domination and complex hegemony. Said cites Gramsci’s idea of cultural hegemony in civil society, where the influence of Orientalist ideas persists by consent rather than imposition, to explain the continued strength of Orientalism as a system of discourse. He calls for a new discursive strategy that recognizes the individuality of nations while impartially examining the general hegemonic relationships between states.
Possible Problems with the text, Orientalism:
- Most importantly for me, Said does not write a lot about the resistance of the colonized Other. What about the resisting subject as part of colonial discourse? The colonized nations occupy a non-static space in colonial history from which they have articulated resistance thereby forcing the colonizer to respond in different ways. Does he have a theory of resistance?
- This brings me to the ways in which the marginalized have resisted their oppression. While not sufficient to counterbalance hegemonic texts, they have always had their own texts. Also, whether through corridos, Yoruba chants or rap, they have challenged the West by making use of the spoken word. (Don’t forget visual art, theatre, music, etc…) In other words, the colonized subjects have a conception of themselves that is outside of the Orientalist panopticon.
- Has the binary opposition between West and East always been a fixed feature of Western discourse? Is history not a little bit more complicated? I am thinking, for example, of the French vs. English relationship with their colonial subjects, and the savage vs. the noble savage etc… Said seems to homogenize the West. However, you can argue that despite the differences within hegemonic discourse, the ‘other’ is always inferior.
- Said does not discuss in detail the role of capitalist expansion in the creation of Orientalist texts. In other words, aside from the literary canon of the West, other forces contributed to the creation of the inferior Other.
In sum, while I see the very obvious logic in Said’s argument, perhaps colonial power was not always imposed from above. The more nuanced history of colonization suggests that hegemonic discourse originated from various sources above, below, inside and outside many discourses of power and resistance. Which brings me to . . .
The Anonymous Babble
Foucault’s position regarding knowledge and power informs Said’s theory of Orientalism. As we have seen, the position of the author as the sole source of meaning is challenged from Saussure, Lacan and Althusser to Derrida for whom language constructs or invents the subject. So for Said the Western texts of a variety of disciplines produce knowledge about the Orient that constructs the Other. However, while Said seems to focus on individual Western authors whose works have collectively contributed to Orientalist power structures, Foucault denies the existence of ‘true’ authors. Furthermore, although he welcomes the shift in focus (a la Barthes) from writer to text, he challenges the notion of a work per se which attributes a false coherence to individual works.
Barthes may have claimed that the author is dead, but Foucault explains that the name of an author functions differently at different moments in history, proving that cultural norms determine our understanding of the author’s connection to a particular text.
Foucault’s association of a text’s recognition of ownership with prohibition and punishment, for example, points to how relationships of power are inherent in socio-political and cultural discourse.
Moreover, he claims that names such as Freud and Marx are “founders of discursivity” in that their writings are perpetually modified to inform new discursive practices, unlike scientific texts whose original authority remains unchallenged. In other words, Freud and Marx are the invisible originators of ever-changing discourses, which modify the original discursive practice as they return to it. (But what are they returning to? When we discuss Freud’s psychoanalysis, what are we discussing?) Thus for Foucault, eliminating the study of an author will allow a more objective analysis of how the text ‘performs’ reality/ies.
Final thoughts:
According to Foucault, the only subject is language itself. He is interested in how the text operates within a culture (mostly European it seems). This is wonderful for interdisciplinary studies and coincides with Said’s notion of Orientalist texts that come from a variety of disciplines. However, if there is no subject, no self, then individual voices of ‘othered’ societies have no agency.
Therefore, while I can see how the Orientalist vision in texts has constructed unequal power relations between peoples, I think that the world has always been made up of more than the two cardinal directions (East and West). Also, texts are produced by societies and individuals alike, the Palestinian-American intellectual voice of Edward Said writing of Orientalism, or that of the African-American feminist, bell hooks, on transgender, for example.
Impressions on “What Is an Author?” by Foucault
In his paper, Michel Foucault tries to answer the question What is an author ? Foucault claims that philosophy took note of the disappearance of the author and that some notions suppressed the meaning of the disappearance. The first notion is in regard with the concept of work. What is a work exactly ? Foucault stipulates that a theory of the work does not exist. According to him, the work of an author certainly includes what has been published, drafts, deleted passages and notes. In the digital age in which we are now, an author’s work would become quite considerable if we’re to take into account everything that’s been written and recorded on various social networks and other digital systems. Since the discurse also exists in oral form, we would have to include all sorts of audio recordings such as radio, television or web interviews as well as personal videos. In such circumstances, a theory of the work is probably more needed than ever. This theory should certainly include a system of classification based on various characteristics (credibilty certainly being an important one). Another notion is that of writing. Foucault claims that this notion should allow to avoid references to an author as well as to cocate his absence.
I am personaly not sure what Foucault means by the idea of the disappearance of the author. To me, the author brings a whole system of values, beliefs, experiences to his work that makes it very personal and in some way biased. A work cannot be dissociated from his author. But here again, I am not even sure if Foucault says it should be or not.
Foucault discusses the issue of the ‘author function’ that is « characteristic of the mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discurses within a society » (108). He formulates four characteristics of the ‘author function’. The first one is that discourses are ‘objects of appropriation’. Secondly, it does not impact all discourses in the same way. By example, it used to be sufficient to state ‘Socrates says’ to accept a discourse like true. Now, scientists would prove a theorem by using logic, arguments and calculations ; an author’s name is not the proof and is therefore not important in some discourses. Thirdly, the ‘author function’ does not develop instantaneously. Finally, it does not refer purely to one individual.
I am not sure what is the role, utility, meaning, extent, ‘function’ of this ‘author function’ and that is certainly something I would like clarify in class.
Orientalism – Edward Saïd
Edward Saïd’s Orientalism is one of the most foundational texts in postcolonial theory. Saïd argues that the notion of the “Orient” was initially a European construction. He explains that historically, the Orient was not defined according to its ontological characteristics but instead based on preconceived notions and ideas advanced by Europeans (that the Orient was a strange and exotic place etc.) in order to justify colonization and the domination of the Orient. In other words, Europeans had invented the concept of the Orient in such a way to assert the superiority of Western culture to all other cultures. Even though such ideas are false, they were perpetuated over time via European journalists and scholars who visited, studied and wrote about the Orient. According to Saïd, it is through such pejorative discourse that the European culture had defined and empowered itself.
This argument highlights; however, that contrary to what the European culture posited, the Orient has a history, a tradition, a culture and thus, is part of a reality that cannot simply be constructed for personal gain. As Saïd would say, the Orient is not “an inert fact of nature,” it has been consciously created by man. Therefore, one cannot come to study or understand the Orient without taking into account everything surrounding this culture, such as the relationship of power between Orient and Occident. But since the Orient has always been “Othered” by the Western world, a true discourse on the Orient has never really existed. Ironically, the discourse on the Orient is rooted in the Western world. For this reason, we should not accept such discourse since Oriental identity is purely founded upon relations of power.
As cliché as it may seem, Saïd is insinuating the idea that power is knowledge. In this case, since the Western world possesses power, it is only them who claim the right to construct knowledge. This inverted cliché suggests that the knowledge that we acquire is often times simply a construction. When a French historian travels to Lebanon, the story he tells about the history of Lebanon is nothing more than a construction that he transmits based on what he sees. He will thus transmit the history of Lebanon for a French audience but what he will write will be imposed on Lebanese people as a reality. This is precisely the problem since a simple story has now become an imposed reality. Nonetheless, it is important to remember that since knowledge is a construction, it is also constantly changing. Although Saïd is a scholar, he will never fully become rooted in the Western world, but rather always remain between both worlds. He sees how the Western world constructs the Orient and vice versa.
One of the problems that arise is that people from the Orient may actually begin to believe the definition that the Western world makes of them to the point where they integrate this erroneous discourse and refuse their own identity. This is sometimes the case in France where minorities of Algerian or African descent will no longer recognize their cultural roots to avoid social exclusion. This is nonetheless a manifestation of power since the dominant discourse imposes itself on a victim and this person will no longer identify with him or herself but instead, simply disappear in the vast majority. The possibility of hybridity is thus completely refused since only the Western discourse is considered as veritable.
But although there are many Western texts that discuss the Orient, these texts should never be considered as being natural or absolute. We should always be skeptical and mindful of Western constructions of the Orient. If we think of the plethora of wars that have occurred in the Middle East, for example, I would argue that these wars have never been at all about peacekeeping (especially when the US is involved). The latter is simply being used as a pretext to justify the domination and appropriation of resources of these countries. Just like the Western world has mythicized the Orient in order to mask a desire for colonization, it continues today to find whatever reasons it can to justify imperialist aims. This is why Saïd’s work is so influential: the implications and questions that it raises continue to be very pertinent today.
What is an Author? – Michel Foucault
In “What is an Author?”, Michel Foucault looks closely into the relationship between author and text and the way in which the text points to this “figure” (101). Therefore, it seems to him that this relationship is of great importance. To introduce the theme, he cites Beckett who states: “What does it matter who is speaking?” (101). For Foucault, this statement illustrates the ethical principles of contemporary writing or what he calls “écriture” (101). He mentions two keys rules pertaining to contemporary writing. First, writing has freed itself from expression because it only refers to itself. He compares writing to the ways in which a game unfolds: it breaks through its own rules and creates space where the “writing subject” disappears. Second, there is a relationship between writing and death. Foucault mentions this in order to underscore the old tradition emphasized in the Greek epic or Arabian tales that seeks to prevent death and perpetuate the idea of immortality of the hero. On the other hand, Foucault explains how in western society, the tradition of perpetuating death has been totally transformed where the writer sacrifices life. Examples such as Flaubert, Proust and Kafka are all cited to show how western writers have their authors die and thus, writing as defined earlier by Foucault results in death.
Foucault then questions the idea of work. He wonders: what is a work? Isn’t it simply what an author has written? He uses the examples of the Marquis de Sade. Thanks to Wikipedia, notice that the word “sadism” is derived from his name, which should give you a hint of what kind of a writer he was. The point is that Sade was not considered to be an author due to his scandalous nature, which raises the question about the status of his work and whether or not all written forms can be considered as works. Foucault further discusses the notion of writing (écriture) and claims that writing is not concerned with the act of writing or indication but should allow us to eschew references to the author and situate his absence (104). Another issue that Foucault raises is the question of the author’s name. He cleverly point out that one cannot simply use an author’s name as a simple reference since it will bias a reader’s point of view about a specific literary work. For example, when hearing the name “Plato”, we will automatically be inclined to linking this name to one of Plato’s famous works and thus lose the specificity of the actual text we are reading.
Foucault goes on to cite four characteristic of the “author-function”. First, since discourse was originally an act that could be placed in the “bipolar field of the profane and the sacred” (108), the author-function served to punish those responsible for transgressive discourse. Second, the author does not affect all discourses universally: we tend to question the author of literary texts but not so much scientific texts. Third, there is a problem of how to attribute a particular text to an author, especially when dealing with literary texts that have not yet been attributed to an author. The danger is that readers will often construct the author according to the criteria that they find pertinent. Finally, Foucault states that the “author” doesn’t uniquely refer to a real individual, but perhaps to an alter ego and functions much more like a narrator.
For Foucault, the author is not an infinite source of meaning, but rather an ideological product that is part of a larger system of beliefs that limits and restricts meaning. Despite agreeing with Barthes that the author-function may soon disappear, he does recognize that since there will always be a system of constraint that exists, absolute freedom cannot fully be attained. But to an extent, I don’t see this as being very problematic since we need to consider authorial intention. If absolute freedom were allowed, then there would be nothing limiting what we say about a text. I don’t know if I accept that all interpretations of a text can be considered as legitimate since this would literally devalue the author entirely, which for me doesn’t seem right.
Orientalism and What is an author?
Orientalism
There are two main ideas that stuck in my mind after I finished reading Said’s text on Orientalism. The first thing was the idea that every text no matter its genre is in some way or another interpolated by politics because its creation is immersed in a politicized world that no one can escape from. This is relevant for us as readers because it opens another door of approximation to a text that allows us to look further than only the formal aspects of what is written.
Even though the final idea that Said has with regards to the importance of an author differs from what Foucault states What is an author? , as Said does think that the author as an individual has a direct effect on a text, I believe there is an aspect in which they both meet and that is that is the notion that what an author writes is highly and inevitably influenced by the political, social and cultural conditions that surround him.
This brings me to the other aspect I would like to talk about and that is the arbitrariness of orientalism. As every other human creation orientalismis based on a set rules determined by the people in a condition of power but there is nothing “natural” about it, the characteristics given to the study of the so called Orient are not inherent to that region of the world, furthermore this region is so diverse that it is hard to wrap the brain around the idea of studying at as whole. The characteristics of the Orient are determined by orientalism only as a set of aspects that exist in negative relation to the Occident. This reminds me of Saussure the arbitrariness of the sign and the negative “nature” of it, the Orient is the Orient because it is not the Occident. Orientalism is created by people from occident who in their historical condition of imperialists and colonialists study it from a point of view of superiority and approach it and represent it as the other that needs to be guided, the other that is not as smart, the other that needs to be repressed in order to “civilized”.
Furthermore, this occidental-oriental approach led to other dichotomies like first world-third world, developed-underdeveloped, etc. that in the same way as the oriental example are created through perception of otherness that U.S. and E.U. have of the rest of the world. What seems most shocking to me is that this discourse is so solid that it is used and perpetuated by Occidentals and Orientals equally.
What is an author?
In What is an Author? Foucault addresses the much debated issue of the relationship between the author and the written work; however I believe that what he says may be applied to other kinds of artistic manifestations too.
It is very difficult to read this text without automatically relating it to Barthes’ Death of the Author but Foucault isn’t too interested in wiping the author out of the picture but in exploring what an author really is. To do this he introduces the idea of function-author which I find absolutely compelling. He explains how an author is not only a name but it may convey a whole discourse, a writing style, a sense of authority, it may differentiate a text from a common everyday words, it is a characteristic that affects the way in which the text exists, circulates and works within a society.
The important thing here is to understand that the author has a function in relation to the text but it is not the text, it is, as I said before, a characteristic of it, an author doesn’t exist before the text, what exists before it is a broader plain of social texts in which the author is immersed. The author is definitely relevant for a discourse it has a very complex relation with it and that it why it appears a little bit too harsh to kill it altogether. At least that is how I understand it.
Orientalism–Edward Said
At the preface of the book Orientalism, Said cited one phrase of Karl Marx :”They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.” This sentence is extremely sharp, it seems that we have been able to clearly foresee the sensitive contents in this article. We could not ignore the fact: when the power intervenes knowledge, knowledge is often used as a tool to reinforce the power, the power of knowledge is pushed into an impure situation, with an impure purpose. Thus, the mixture of power and knowledge is often controversial and questionable. This controversial topic – knowledge and power – is what Edward Said want to express and discuss in this book. Through the generation and development of the Oriental Studies, Said tried to give the reader a clear overview of Orientalism, but all the discussion is surrounded by the topic of knowledge and power. From the United States to Britain and France, the impurity of the Oriental Studies as a discipline is always obvious. Ideological analysis and the criticism of political power are the manifest characteristics of Said’s Orientalism.
For years, the political overtones in Orientalism is evident, Orientalism is actually an ideological science which involves economics, politics and sociology in its historical evolution. It comes from its intimacy between Britain and France, as a cultural and political fact, it reveals the distinction between the Orient and the Occident and expresses the way the Occident controls the Orient. Orientalism guarantees the superiority of western developed countries over eastern developing countries.
The Orient is an entity of real geography, history and culture, it is not imaginary. Orientalism studies not only the artificial consistency of concepts, but also the structure of power and forces. Cultural hegemony is an important element in the studies, Orientalism is established on the basis of Western consciousness, this kind of discourse is under the control of the transformation and evolution of political power, academic power, cultural power, ethnical power, etc.. Scholars or writers are westerners, their viewpoint is western, the Orientalism is inevitably westernized, Orientalism became a part of western civilization, in which the relationship between the imperialism and the culture is playing a dominant role. Due to political considerations and economic benefits, due to the understanding of the Orient, the Occident entrusted itself the right to interfere in Eastern affairs. So the center of power can transform the knowledge into more power through the control of the Orient, the colonization. The internal relations of colonial hegemony and colonial discourse and the connection between academic studies and political elements in Orientalism become more and more intense due to the superposition of the historical events.
Said thinks this kind of Orientalism is a failure, his Orientalism has a significance of enlightenment, he supports multiculturalism, as to him, the confidence and the subjectivity of the Orient should be established fairly, the Occident should rethink profoundly their colonial oppression of the East. Then the understanding between Eastern and Western people and their cultures will be enhanced and from this perspective, Orientalism will definitely contribute to the world peace.
Orientalism–Edward Said
At the preface of the book Orientalism, Said cited one phrase of Karl Marx :”They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.” This sentence is extremely sharp, it seems that we have been able to clearly foresee the sensitive contents in this article. We could not ignore the fact: when the power intervenes knowledge, knowledge is often used as a tool to reinforce the power, the power of knowledge is pushed into an impure situation, with an impure purpose. Thus, the mixture of power and knowledge is often controversial and questionable. This controversial topic – knowledge and power – is what Edward Said want to express and discuss in this book. Through the generation and development of the Oriental Studies, Said tried to give the reader a clear overview of Orientalism, but all the discussion is surrounded by the topic of knowledge and power. From the United States to Britain and France, the impurity of the Oriental Studies as a discipline is always obvious. Ideological analysis and the criticism of political power are the manifest characteristics of Said’s Orientalism.
For years, the political overtones in Orientalism is evident, Orientalism is actually an ideological science which involves economics, politics and sociology in its historical evolution. It comes from its intimacy between Britain and France, as a cultural and political fact, it reveals the distinction between the Orient and the Occident and expresses the way the Occident controls the Orient. Orientalism guarantees the superiority of western developed countries over eastern developing countries.
The Orient is an entity of real geography, history and culture, it is not imaginary. Orientalism studies not only the artificial consistency of concepts, but also the structure of power and forces. Cultural hegemony is an important element in the studies, Orientalism is established on the basis of Western consciousness, this kind of discourse is under the control of the transformation and evolution of political power, academic power, cultural power, ethnical power, etc.. Scholars or writers are westerners, their viewpoint is western, the Orientalism is inevitably westernized, Orientalism became a part of western civilization, in which the relationship between the imperialism and the culture is playing a dominant role. Due to political considerations and economic benefits, due to the understanding of the Orient, the Occident entrusted itself the right to interfere in Eastern affairs. So the center of power can transform the knowledge into more power through the control of the Orient, the colonization. The internal relations of colonial hegemony and colonial discourse and the connection between academic studies and political elements in Orientalism become more and more intense due to the superposition of the historical events.
Said thinks this kind of Orientalism is a failure, his Orientalism has a significance of enlightenment, he supports multiculturalism, as to him, the confidence and the subjectivity of the Orient should be established fairly, the Occident should rethink profoundly their colonial oppression of the East. Then the understanding between Eastern and Western people and their cultures will be enhanced and from this perspective, Orientalism will definitely contribute to the world peace.
