Orientalism - Edward Said

Why, when thinking of the

Middle East, do we have preconceived

notions of what kind of people,

what kind of life goes on there?

• “The Orient” is a European invention.
• The Orient has been used to define what Europe is not - Binary relationship.
• Orientalism is a style of thought based on distinctions between Orient and Occident.
• It is a power relationship, bestowing all the power upon the West or Occident.
• Representations of the Orient (and the ability to represent it) was appropriated by Europeans.
• Orientalism is a system of knowledge, a body of theoretical and practical knowledge which frames the Orient in the Western consciousness.
• European identity is hierarchilized as superior to all others.

• The author of a text writes from a perspective of his/her relationships - a position not always situated in the Orient, but in the West.
• The Orientalist writer attempts to place himself outside of the Orient, aiming for objectivity, but still carries a western bias.
• “Unnnatural” depictions of the Orient - they emanate from western techniques of representation.
• Orientalism is a system of citing works and authors. Like any other such system, it builds upon itself, thus transmitting Orientalism throughout the culture.
• It connects literary study with ideology, politics, and the logic of power.
• Orientalism is anti-libertarian, repressive and manipulative. It follows the logic of Foucault’s power/knowledge.
• It is pervasive in contemporary media; film, television. It is today even more politicized than before.

"There is such a thing as knowledge that is less, rather than more, partial than the individual... who produces it. Yet this knowledge is not therefore automatically non-political" (1873)

"No one has ever devised a method for detaching the scholar from the circumstances of life, from the fact of his involvement with a class, a set of beliefs... These continue to bear on what he does professionally, even though naturally enough his research and its fruits do attempt to reach a level of relative freedom" (1873)

Orientalism - Edward Said

Said's Theory of Orientalism

Said's View

Pure and Political Knowledge

Pure Knowledge

Political Knowledge

"the general consensus that 'true' knowledge is fundamentally non-political" (1873)

knowledge - power

Knowledge of political importance // proximity of the field to ascertainable sources of power in political society.

"The distinction between 'humanists' and persons whose work has policy implications, or political significance, can be broadened further by saying that the former's ideological color is a matter of incidental importance to politics (although possibly of great moment to his colleagues in the field, who may object to his Stalinism or fascism or too easy liberalism), whereas the ideology of the latter is woven directly into his material - indeed, economics, politics, and sociology in the modern academy are ideological sciences - and therefore taken for granted as being 'political'" (1873).

cultural and historical knowledge

"discourse"

A "humanist" (someone in the field of humanities) "is not involved in anything political" because "what he does seems to have no direct effect upon reality in the everyday sense" (1873).

"Every writer on the Orient... assumes some Oriental precedent, some previous knowledge of the Orient, to which he refers and on which he relies" (1882).

"Literary history" (as opposed to "economics") does not appear to saturate the academy as much (1874).

history as a product

"Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureacracies and colonial styles" (1866-67).

"humanists" importance to politics is "incidental"

The idea held that "most knowledge produced in the contemporary west... (ought to be) scholarly, academic, impartial,above partisan or small-minded doctrinal belief" (1873).

"Too often literature and culture are presumed to be politically, even historically innocent; it has regularly seemed otherwise to me... that society and literary culture can only be understood and studied together." (1887)

Michel Foucault

Influential Theorists

Antonio Gramsci

"Hegemony"

"certain cultural forms predominate over others, just as certain ideas are more influential than others; the form of this cultural leadership is what Gramsci has identified as "hegemony," an indispensable concept for any understanding of cultural life in the industrial West." (Said, 1871)

Civil and political society vs. state institutions

consensual vs. coercive

American Orientalism

India, East Asia

Orientalist Literature

Gustav Flaubert

Victor Hugo

Les Orientales

Salammbô

Portrayal of Carthage's culture as morally corrupting, violent, and suffused with dangerously alluring eroticism. (Wikipedia)

41 poems, tableaux depicting Eastern Mediterranean

freedom-loving Greeks vs. the imperialistic Ottoman Turks

"The brazen arms were working more quickly. They paused no longer. Every time that a child was placed in them the priests of Moloch spread out their hands upon him to burden him with the crimes of the people, vociferating: "They are not men but oxen!" and the multitude round about repeated: "Oxen! oxen!" The devout exclaimed: "Lord! Eat!". (Chapter 13)

Art by Alphonse Mucha (1896)

The depiction of Turks in "Les Orientales" mixes condemnation, idealisation, and crude envy. It is often cited as being representative of the "Orientalist" attitudes in much of French literature. (Wikipedia)

Illustration by Gérard Seguin

Orientalist Paintings

Jean-Leon Gerome (1824-1904)

Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863)

Jean-Baptiste Huysmans (1826-1906)

Contemporary Orientalism in Popular Media

European Orientalism

Orientalism in Television and Films

Orientalism in Popular Literature and Media

Middle East

News

Fiction

"to be a European or an American... meant and means being dimly aware, however dimly that one belongs to a power with definite interests in the Orient" (1874).

What does Orientalism say about

the Culture "doing" the Other-ing?

Is the "Other-ed" culture complicit

in its own Orientalization?