Orientalism by Edward Said

Discrepant Experiences

The Importance of His Next Example

Said immediately jumps into another example: examining two texts: The Description and Aja'ib al-Athar.

Said opens up this portion of his text with the following:

"Let us begin by accepting the notion that although there is an irreducible subjective core to human experience, this experience is also historical and secular it is accessible to analysis and interpretation"

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?

The complexities of human experience involves aspects of history, and history is analyzed and interpreted.

Who is the Interpreter?

The Description

Said then begins to describe his idea that there are two sides to every question, or in other words two sides to every interpretation.

He tries to break down the idea that there are "historical analyses of historical experience around exclusions, exclusions that stipulate for instance that only women can understand feminine experience, only Jews can understand Jewish suffering, only formerly colonial subjects can understand colonial experience".

The idea that only the specific group of people themselves, can understand their specific experience brings Said to his second point, that it is historically created and the result of interpretation:

"And second, you are likely as a consequnce to defend the essence or experience itself rather than promote full knowledge of it and its entaglements and dependencies on other knowledge. As a result, you will demote the different experience of others to a lesser status".

The Description was a 24 volume account of Napoleon's expedition to Egypt produced by the team of French scientists which he took with him. It was written by Jean Baptise Joseph Fourier

Aja'ib al-Athar

This text was written by Abad al Rahman al Jabarti who was an Egyptian religious leader, who experienced the French Expedition.

SO...?

From the excerpts of these two texts, what can we conclude?

AND

How does this relate to what we have covered in class?

What's The Point IN THIS ALL?

"The Sorry Tale is Repeated Again and Again "

Through all his examples, and statements Said writes this to go beyond the idea of "East VS. West".

His examples that he discusses and "later discusses" are valuable because they attempt to understand the heterogeneous components and developments to explain "so called world historians as well as the colonial Orientalists" who put immense amount of material of the history of people in "all-encomposing rubrics".

"We should try to enlist what we can truly comprehend of other cultures and periods".

Other Examples of Interpretation

Said states that rather than affirming various histories on one another and the necessary interaction of contemporary societies with one another, the seperation of cultures assured "murderous "imperial contest between them- the sorry tale is repeated again and again"

Bottom of page 38-

The Western representations of Arabs: "crude, reductionist, coarsely racialist" . In films and TV shows, Arabs are portrayed as sleazy, "camel jockeys", terrorists.

Orientalism by Edward Said

Class Presentation - Sneha Patel

Orientalism was written in 1978 by Edward Saïd to examine the false cultural assumptions of the “Western World”, facilitating the cultural misrepresentation of the “The Orient”, in general, and of the Middle East, in particular.

Clarification on Coexistance

There Are Two Sides to Every Story

NOTE: Said clarifies his notion of "discrepant experience" : on the bottom of page 32, (starting at "No experience..."

IN SUM: No interpreted experience can be characterized without another aspect or object intervening it.

It is Edward Said's goal to allow experiences and views that are ideologically and culturally closed to one another to exist simultaneously. He does not wish to reduce ideology because he believes the "exposure and dramatization of discrepancy highlights cultural importance" In turn, this allows us to continuously comprehend it's influence.

The majority of these next few pages of Said's text are various examples depicting his idea that interpretation and perspectives are key in understanding historical experiences.

The first example he uses shows the connection between "coronation rituals in England and the Indian durbars of the late nineteenth century".

He states that it is vital to pick apart and think through "together experiences" that are discrepant, each different in their own ways, but coming forth into coexistence and interaction with one another.