35 Orientalism and Thereafter: Edward Said

Dr. Monirul Islam

1.   Introduction 

Edward W. Said (1935-2003), born in West Jerusalem in a Palestinian Christian family, was brought up in Jerusalem, Cairo, Lebanon and the USA. He lived the life of a perennial exile spending most of his mature life in America. He had been one of the most widely known intellectuals of the twentieth century. He wrote more than twenty books, published numerous essays and articles, lectured in universities all over the globe, held distinguished chairs in several universities, was awarded many honorary degrees, including an honorary doctorate by Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. He was trained as a literary critic and wrote his  first book, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography in1966. His second book of literary criticism was named Beginnings: Intentions and Method (1975). After the Arab-Israel war of 1967 Said’s interest in politics increased and he became critical of the Zionist expansionism and Western misrepresentation of the Arabs and Palestinians. Apart from the Orientalism trilogy, some of his other important works are: The World, the Text and the Critic (1983), Culture and Imperialism (1993), The Last Sky: Palestine Lives (1986), Peace and Its Discontents (1995). Said’s autobiography Out of Place was published in 1999.

Much of Said’s fame as a cultural theorist and a public intellectual espousing the cause of the Palestinians came in the aftermath of the publication of Orientalism : Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978).  The present module chiefly aims to  introduce  the readers to Said’s thesis in Orientalism. The title of the module, however,  indicates   that  the discussion will move beyond Orientalism. The title echoes the titles of at least two essays that offer to critically read Said’s Orientalism : one is Aizaz Ahmad’s 1992  essay “Orientalism and After: Ambivalence and Cosmopolitan Location in the Work of Edward Said” and the other one is “Orientalism and After” by Nivedita Menon also published in 1992. It reflects the great afterlife the book Orientalism (1978) has enjoyed. Since its publication, the book  has been translated into several languages and as Said wrote in the “Afterword” added to the book in 1995, “Orientalism, in almost Borgesian way, has become several different books”. It has received much critical adulation, but Said has also been vilified  for  his arguments in Orentalism. This module, therefore, would go beyond Orientalism and it would do so in three ways: firstly, it would look back to some works on Orientalism before Said; secondly, it would identify some developments in critical theory that has been made possible by Said’s book, and looks at some of the critiques of Said’s theory of Orientalism; and thirdly, it would provide a very brief introduction to a few other works of Said.

2.  Before Orientalism

Before Said a number of thinkers worked on Western representation of the Orient, criticised Orientalism as a metadiscourse and tried to expose the falsifying nature of it. A series of books and essays were published in the 1960s and early 1970s dealing with the representation of Islam and Orient in Western literary and cultural texts. Norman Daniel’s Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (1960) documents the prejudiced view of the Islamic Middle East in Western literature since the Middle ages. Daniel argues that the Western Christian civilization developed a negative image of Islam in the medieval period as sort of defence mechanism to deal with a civilization that was far superior to the European. A. L. Tibwai English Speaking Orientalism: A Critique of their Approach to Islam and Arab Nationalism (1964) is critical of modern Orientalists’ reliance on the medieval image of Islam despite its academic advances. Tibwai argues that certain stereotypes of the Orient  continued to persist in the writings of the Westerners when they wrote on the Orient: Orientals as lacking tolerance, objectivity, courtesy continued to hold sway even in modern times. Anouar Abdel- Malek in his article “Orientalism in Crisis,” (1963) is critical of the Orientalist  projects which, Malek argues, aimed at opening the ground to the West to ensure subjection of the Orientals. Sayed Hussain Alatas in his sociological study, The Myth of the Lazy  Native (1977), attempts to demonstrate how myths of the Orientals persevere in the writing of the Westerners and proffers the argument that such myths are to be dismantled. Hichem Djait, Europe and Islam originally written in Arabic, published in French in 1978 and in English in 1985, criticises Western modernity as an extension of Orientalism which attempted to bring non-western culture within the ambit of its own notion of humanity. Said himself wrote articles like “Shattered Myths” (1975), “Arab Islam and the Dogmas of the West” (1976 ) that came before Orientalism and which were critical of the Western perception of the Arab Islamic World. Edward Said built upon all these works to produce his towering book Orientalism, which unravels the link between Orientalist knowledge and colonial power and aims at deconstructing the falsifying myths of the Orient.

3.   Orientalism

 Structure 

Orientalism is the first book of the trilogy, the two other books in the series being The Question of Palestine (1979) and Covering Islam (1981), which explores the imbalance of relationship between the Arab Islamic world on the one hand and European and American colonial power on the other. Structurally the book is divided into three parts. The first part, “The Scope of Orientalism,” focuses on Western representation of the Orient, on ‘Orientalizing the Oriental’ as Said puts it. In the second part, “Orientalist Structures and Restructures,” Said attempts at an exposition of how the philological, historical and literary writers of the nineteenth century built their discourses around the traditional knowledge  of the Orient to recreate it textually. Such textual rendering of the Orient, Said contends, facilitated the colonial administration to exercise its dominance over the Orient. The  third  part, “Orientalism Now,” analyses modern Orientalism; it locates the continuity of the earlier practices of British and French Orientalists in the contemporary American discourses on the Orient.

Did You Know?

In the current edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary one of the meanings of the term ‘Orient’ is: “the countries east of the Mediterranean esp. those of eastern Asia.” The term ‘Orient’ is often used as an alternative to the term ‘East’. As a location Orient/East may be taken to extend from those countries that begin with Islam on the Eastern Mediterranean and stretch through Asia. Said’s Orientalism is chiefly concerned with the Islamic Middle East as the Orient and it attends to the constructedness of this Orient. Orientalists have constructed the Orient by formation of certain stereotypes of the Orient and the Orientals.

 Definitions of Orientalism

Orientalism, Said, argues, is “a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western Experience” (1). Influenced by Foucault’s formulations on the links between knowledge and power, Said rejects the idea that modern Orientalist theory is a disinterested practice. He provides a very broad definition of Orientalism. There are three different but interlinked trajectories of Said’s definition. To start with, Said defines Orientalism as an academic discipline. According to Said, “Anyone who teaches, writes about or researches the Orient” is an Orientalist and what this person does is Orientalism. The academic discipline of Orientalism emerged in the eighteenth century when Europe’s interest in the culture of the East increased and it persists in contemporary world in different forms such as Area Studies or Oriental Studies, Islamic Studies etc. With a plethora of texts written, translated, imitated, the unfamiliar, unknowable Orient became familiar and known. The translations, pseudo-translations, imitations of Oriental  literary texts, researches on oriental languages, travelogues, histories that started to pour in during the eighteenth century created an archive of knowledge, which, Said asserts, helped perpetuating certain Western stereotypes of the Orient and ultimately served the cause of the Empire. Said justifies the complicity of academic discipline of Orientalism and the imperial power by pointing out that the upsurge of Oriental Studies coincided with the period of European imperial expansionism between 1815 and 1914.

Orientalism and Empire: An Example

That the scholarly knowledge of the Orientalists could come to aid of the Empire can be illustrated by an example. Warren Hastings, who patronised Indic studies in Calcutta, wrote a letter to the Chairman of the East India Company, Nathaniel Smith, seeking his help for the publication of Charles Wilkins’ translation of the Bhagvat-Gita(1785). Hastings wrote: “Every accumulation of knowledge and especially such as is obtained by social communication with people over whom we exercise a dominion founded on the right of conquest, is useful to the state”.  Hastings’s remarks clearly show that he was thinking of the usefulness of Wilkins’s translation to the colonial administration.

Secondly, Orientalism, Said argues is a style of thought that presupposes an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident’”. Orientalism, in other words, constructs binary opposition, where the Orient becomes the ‘inferior’ Other of the ‘superior’ West. This definition of Orientalism is very expansive in terms of historical time and in terms of different fields of knowledge it encompasses. It can accommodate a writer like Aeschylus from the classical antiquity and a modern novelist like Joseph Conrad, on the one hand, and political theorists like Karl Marx, on the other. Said, however, is aware of the problem of such a widening of scope and he does not equate modern Orientalism to the Orientalist practices of the earlier centuries:

The difference between representations of the Orient before the last third of the eighteenth century and those after it (that is, those belonging to what I call modern Orientalism) is that the range of representation expanded enormously in the later period. It is true that after William Jones and Anquetil-Duperron, and after Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition, Europe came to know the Orient more scientifically, to live in it with greater authority and discipline than ever before. But what mattered to Europe was the expanded scope and the much greater refinement given its techniques for receiving the Orient.

Taking Napoleons’ Egyptian expedition (1798-1801) as the inaugural point for modern Orientalism, Said provides his third definition of Orientalism as “the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient”. Said uses Michelle Foucault’s notion of discourse to comment on the systematic discipline of Orientalism “by which the European culture was able to manage— and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, ideologically, and imaginatively during the Post-Enlightenment period.” As the discourse of Orientalism, Said argue, controls any study of it, the Orient “was not (and is not) a free subject of thought and action”.  The relationship between the Occident and the Orient, therefore, is a “relationship of power, of varying degrees of complex hegemony”.

Discourse, in the Foucauldian sense of the term, is the way in which knowledge is constituted. It produces and organises meaning. Social practices and institutions, such as education, politics, religion, and law, are constituted by discourse and situated within it. For Foucault, there is no free subject, since subjectivity itself is constituted by discourse. Following this, Said argues, that the Orient as a subject was/is never free because it is constituted by and within the discourse Orientalism.

Ontology refers to that part of metaphysics that engages with the nature of existence in general or is concerned with the question of being.

Epistemology is the philosophy of knowledge or theory of knowledge. Inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion that the world of appearance is not the thing- in- itself but theproduct of man’s imagination, Said adopts the position that knowledge or truth is impressed upon the world by those who belongs to the position of power.

Said adds the dimension of literary criticism to the scholarly and historical analysis of Orientalism. He suggests that Orientalism is literary and literature like other cultural texts played a crucial role in the formation of the ideas of the Orient and Orientals. Therefore, paying attention to the literary texts would reveal much of Western misconceptions and politics of misrepresentations of the Orient. According to Said, it is not that manifestly imperial texts such as that of Rudyard Kipling that served the cause of the Empire but even the works of authors like Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, who didn’t have any apparent imperial connection, enabled imperial exploitation of the Orient. The  full implication of these arguments was developed in  his later  works. Said’s project in Orientalism is to undo the underlying assumptions that form the foundation of Orientalist thought. He advocates a rejection of Orientalism and its cultural constructions, its racial and religious prejudices.

Latent and Manifest Orientalism

In latent Orientalism dreams and fantasies about the Orient remains constant over time. It is “a body of ideas beliefs, clichés learning about orient”. The view that oriental are despotic, sensual, lazy, backward persists in Western writings through different historical periods. The section “Oriental Dreams,” in Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater reflects some of the unchanging misconceptions of the Orient and can be cited as an example of latent Orientalism. Manifest Orientalism is the Orientalist knowledge that is produced at different historical juncture and the policy decisions made based on it. James Mill’s History of British India is an example of manifest Orientalism.

4. Significance of Orientalism

The significance of Orientalism lies in its method of taking up the question of cultural difference and politics of representation. Said’s approach has gone beyond the study of Orient and provided the methodology to critique any form of cultural prejudice and misrepresentation. The book, in other words, has supplied  the  methodology of writing back to power. It opened up the possibility of the silent having a voice not only  against  the Western cultural hegemony, but similar other hegemonic practices in different locales;  it paved the way for deconstructing, multiple other relationships of domination and subordination. The book has proved most influential in the area  of  colonial  discourse analysis and is considered to be the originary text for postcolonial studies. Said’s formulations have been critically worked upon and extended by Homi K. Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak , who, along with Said, are considered to be the  ‘Holy Trinity’  in the field of postcolonial studies. Bhabha admits that the object of colonial discourse is to construct the colonised people as degenerate and inferior on the basis of race to justify colonisation and establish a system of colonial administration, but he claims that at the heart of colonial discourse there is ambivalence. The object of colonial discourse is to produce the ‘mimic man’ – almost the same but “not quite/ not white” Other. The colonial ambition of producing this ‘mimic’ subjects is never fully met, because colonial discourse aims at combining sameness with difference. The mimic man, Bhabha argues in “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” is an “effect of flawed colonial mimesis” because mimicry is “a sign of double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation and discipline.” Mimicry, therefore, is “at once resemblance and menace.” “The menace of mimicry” as Bhabha puts it, “is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence also disrupts authority” .

The ‘mimic man,’ therefore, is a subversive space, a site of potential threat to the empire. Like Bhabaha, Spivak  is  also critical of Said at some  points, but she gives Said the full credit for creating a theoretical space that has given voice to the marginal. Spivak’s work on subalternity draws on Said. The exponents of subaltern studies and postcolonial historians like Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakravarty and Partha Chatterjee, to name a few, have been inspired by Said’s thesis in Orientalism

5. Critique of Orientalism

Some of the general criticisms of Said’s Orientalism are: It is very monolithic in its conceptions of the Orient and the Occident. He ignores the internal fissures of Orintalism. Said ignores the fact that every Orientalist did not condemn the East. There  were  also eulogies. The question of gender and class is elided in Orientalism. Said has been criticised  for taking Napoleon’s Egyptian invasion as the starting point for the discipline  of Orientalism, rather than in the earlier efforts in Orientalist scholarship. Raymond Schwab in his study, The Oriental Renaissance, for example, identifies the translation of the Zend- Avesta in 1671 as a major breakthrough in Oriental studies. It has been accused that Said didn’t consider the example of German Orientalism and his theory cannot explain the growth of Oriental studies in Germany, because Germany did not have Empire in the East. The most scathing criticism of Orientalism came from the right wing intellectuals. Edward Alexander writing for the right-wing journal, Commentary, dubbed him a pedantic and a fanatic for his criticism of the West. Said was also personally attacked in the USA and his life was literally threatened for his support for the Arab Islamic world. Orientalists and Area Studies scholars rose in arms against Said. Bernard Lewis in “Orientalism: An Exchange” (1982) accused Said of polluting the term ‘Orientalism’ beyond redemption. Lewis claimed  that Orientalism is pure objective practice. Said has been criticised by Dennis Porter in “Orientalism and Its Problems” (1983) for wrongly appropriating Foucault’s notion of discourse and because of his ambivalent position on the relationship between knowledge and ideology. Marxist critic Aizaz Ahmad in the fifth chapter of his book, In Theory: Classes,  Nations,  Literatures (1992), criticises Said for embracing the ideals of humanism when humanism as history has been rejected. He objects that Said supposes that there is a  unified  Western identity which is at the origin of history and this seamless history does not change. Ahmad is also critical of Said’s adoption of Nietzschean stance that puts in doubt the veracity of truth. As a Marxist, Ahmad believed in the possibility of making true statements. Robert Young in White Mythologies (1990) objects that Said offers no alternative to Orientalism. James Clifford in “On Orientalism” accuses Said of using the same Western tools of liberalism that he aims to criticise and his critique becomes a form of Occidentalism.

6. Beyond Orientalism

To understand Said’s thesis in Orientalism better we may have a look at the arguments  he made in some of his other books. The Arab-Israel war in 1967 and its outcome changed the course of Said’s life and from a literary critic he was transformed into cultural theorists. The Question of Palestine is a critique of Zionism which, Said argues, refuses to give recognition to the realities and experiences of the Palestinians. Said considers Zionist policies as an extension of British colonial legacy and sees Zionism as the discourse behind colonial occupation of the Orient. He was looking at Zionism from the perspective of its victims. Covering Islam, which Said started writing in 1789, focuses on how Western media’s ‘covering’ i.e. representation of Islam is misconstrued. The book extends the arguments of Orientalism and aims to expose the fact that the monolithic and homogeneous image of ‘Islam’ that American media presents is a myth. In the wake of the Iranian hostage crisis of November, 1789, when the America Embassy in Tehran was seized by some Iranian students, the American media’s blind eyed critic of Islam as a whole, according to Said, shows the failure of the media to attend to the ground realities.

Another very important work of Said is The World, the Text and the Critic. Said suggests that ‘worldliness’ of the critic is as fundamental as the ‘worldliiness’ of the text. By ‘worldliness’ he means affiliation of the critic or the text to the ‘world’. Critical activity, for Said, cannot be delinked from society and life, and the literary critic should not confine himself to the ivory-tower of his specialised world. He advocates secular criticism and amateurism which would do away with the rarefied specialised world of criticism. Secular criticism is different from critical practices like practical criticism, literary theory, literary history, and appreciation and interpretatio n. Criticism for said is political and social engagement and the task of the critic is to speak truth to power. Said’s own acts of literary criticism in Culture and Imperialism shows his theory in practice. In the book Said advocates a method of reading literary texts which he defines as contrapuntal, a term he borrows from musical tradition. Contrapuntal method would involve reading with full knowledge of the history of the colonizers and also of the colonised. His essays on some of the canonical texts of English literature reads back the texts using contrapuntal method to unravel the hidden imperial elements in them. Said’s analysis of the texts lays bare the complicity of cultural forms and imperial politics.

7. In conclusion

The purpose of this module was to introduce some of the key ideas of the best known literary critic of the twentieth century, especially his notion of Orientalism. Said’s critique of Orientalism, as seen above, had its precedence, but Said’s overarching critique opened up  new possibilities for speaking on the politics of representation and on the role cultural texts played in this. Postcolonial discourse analysis, subaltern studies and many other forms of critical reading developed out of Said’s arguments in Orientalism. The analysis of Said’s life and work, therefore, indicate that literary criticism at its best can be a form of activism.

 8. Reference

• Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures. London ; New York: Verso, 2008. Print. Ashcroft, Bill, and Pal Ahluwalia. Edward Said. 2 edition. London ; New York: Routledge, 2008.Print.
• Bhabha, H. K. The Location of Culture. London; New York: Routledge.1994. Print Macfie, Alexander Lyon. Orientalism: A Reader. New York: NYU Press, 2001. Print.
• Moustafa Bayoumi, and Andrew Rubin Eds.. The Edward Said Reader. 1 edition. New York: Vintage, 2000. Print.
• Said, Edward W. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World. Revised edition. New York: Vintage, 1997. Print.
• —Orientalism. 1978. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2001. Print.
• —. Culture and Imperialism. Reprint edition. New York: Vintage, 1994. Print.
• —. The Question of Palestine. Reissue edition. New York: Vintage, 1992. Print.
• —. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Reprint edition. Milton Keynes, UK ;Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983. Print.
• Sardar, Ziauddin. Orientalism. 1 edition. Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press, 1999. Print.