Orientalism and Representation

1. Reading Orientalism

Orientalism is our doorway to colonial discourse but the two terms are not interchangeable. Colonial discourses are more complex and variable the Said's model of Orientalism; they encapsulate Orientalism , and go beyond it!

Said's Orientalism is a study of how the Western colonial powers of Britain and France represented North Africa and Middle eastern lands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The Orient is the collective noun Said uses to refer to these places . Orientalism refers to the sum of the West's representations of the Orient. In the book's later chapters , Said looks at how Orientalism still survives today in Western Media reports of Eastern, esp Arab, lands, despite formal decolonization for many countries. This reinforces the point made previously that the machinery of colonialism does not simply disappear as soon as the colonies become independent. Indeed, Said shows how modes of representation common to colonialism have continued after decolonization and are still very much a part of the contemporary world. 

One of Orientalism's many commendable qualities is its readability. Although a lengthy academic work that draws upon some complex scholarship, particularly the political theories of Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault, Said's written style is accessible and noted for its clarity and lucidity. 

2. The discourse of "Orientalism" in the Western literary canon.

Edward Said's signature contribution to academic life is the book Orientalism. It has been influential in about half a dozen established disciplines, especially literary studies (English, comparative literature), history, anthropology, sociology, area studies (especially middle east studies), and comparative religion. However, as big as Orientalism was to academia, Said’s thoughts on literature and art continued to evolve over time, and were encapsulated in Culture and Imperialism (1993), a book which appeared nearly 15 years after Orientalism (1978). Put highly reductively, the development of his thought can be understood as follows: Said’s early work began with a gesture of refusal and rejection, and ended with a kind of ambivalent acceptance. If Orientalism questioned a pattern of misrepresentation of the non-western world, Culture and Imperialism explored with a less confrontational tone the complex and ongoing relationships between east and west, colonizer and colonized, white and black, and metropolitan and colonial societies. 

Said directly challenged what Euro-American scholars traditionally referred to as "Orientalism." Orientalism is an entrenched structure of thought, a pattern of making certain generalizations about the part of the world known as the 'East'. As Said puts it:

“Orientalism was ultimately a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, West, "us") and the strange (the Orient, the East, "them").”

Just to be clear, Said didn't invent the term 'Orientalism'; it was a term used especially by middle east specialists, Arabists, as well as many who studied both East Asia and the Indian subcontinent. The vastness alone of the part of the world that European and American scholars thought of as the "East" should, one imagines, have caused some one to think twice. But for the most part, that self-criticism didn’t happen, and Said argues that the failure there –- the blind spot of orientalist thinking –- is a structural one. 

The stereotypes assigned to Oriental cultures and "Orientals" as individuals are pretty specific: Orientals are despotic and clannish. They are despotic when placed in positions of power, and sly and obsequious when in subservient positions. Orientals, so the stereotype goes, are impossible to trust. They are capable of sophisticated abstractions, but not of concrete, practical organization or rigorous, detail-oriented analysis. Their men are sexually incontinent, while their women are locked up behind bars. Orientals are, by definition, strange. The best summary of the Orientalist mindset would probably be: “East is east and west is west, and never the twain shall meet” (Rudyard Kipling). 

In his book, Said asks: but where is this sly, devious, despotic, mystical Oriental? Has anyone ever met anyone who meets this description in all particulars? In fact, this idea of the Oriental is a particular kind of myth produced by European thought, especially in and after the 18th century. In some sense his book Orientalism aims to dismantle this myth, but more than that Said's goal is to identify Orientalism as a discourse. 

3. The shape of Orientalism

Orientalisme constructs binary divisions.

4. Stereotypes of the Orient

Here are the stereotypes:

5. Criticism of Orientalism

1-Orientalism is ahistorical:

6. The Hidden Aim behind the Construction of the "Orient".

From Myth to Discourse. The oriental is a myth or a stereotype, but Said shows that the myth had, over the course of two centuries of European thought, come to be thought of as a kind ofsystematic knowledge about the East. Because the myth masqueraded as fact, the results of studies into eastern cultures and literature were often self-fulfilling. It was accepted as a common fact that Asians, Arabs, and Indians were mystical religious devotees incapable of rigorous rationality. It is unsurprising, therefore that so many early European studies into, for instance, Persian poetry, discovered nothing more or less than the terms of their inquiry were able to allow: mystical religious devotion and an absence of rationality. 

Political Dominance. Said showed that the myth of the Oriental was possible because of European political dominance of the Middle East and Asia. In this aspect of his thought he was strongly influenced by the French philosopher Michel Foucault. The influence from Foucault is wide-ranging and thorough, but it is perhaps most pronounced when Said argues that Orientalism is a full-fledged discourse, not just a simple idea, and when he suggests that all knowledge is produced in situations of unequal relations of power. In short, a person who dominates another is the only one in a position to write a book about it, to establish it, to define it. It’s not a particular moral failing that the stereotypical failing defined as Orientalism emerged in western thinking, and not somewhere else. 

7. The Notion of Oriental Silence

Said has formulated the word ‘Oriental Silence’ (Said, 1995, p.9) to stress the fact that the East has never tried to protest against such dominations in the past and doing so, they have allowed the West to proceed. It denotes that they have accepted the intellectual subjugation and academic supremacy of the West or they are waiting for a perfect time to speak out. He has given no justification to such a doubt but mentioned that a scholarly protest in the near future may arise like the ‘Field Day’ movement (ibid, p.353). The East may not have pedagogic excellence compared to that of the West but they have many other hidden talents which will evoke the unawaken peak of conscience. Hence, it can be predicted that they may object to be called as subjects or subalterns but the certainty of such a revolution in future is on doubts.

There is no disagreement that general readers do not survey the actual facts and believe what the authors say in words. For example, when a person speaks of black man’s sexuality and jealousy referring to Othello (1603), hardly any common reader protests. There is hardly any denial that Othello speaks black man’s jealousy on love and sex and it makes readers believe that black people are more sexually provoked and the reason for this silence is supposed to be the  stern establishment of orthodoxies regarding the black-skinned individuals rooted by the higher intelligentsia. Several psychoanalytic illustrations and historical documentary proofs forcefully convince the minds of the general readers to adopt such concepts. Another similar example is Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness where the Africans are depicted as slaves who are unable to revolt against the slavery enforcement. 

All writings on Eastern culture are presented in a contrast against the Western culture where the West is the superior one in all respects, strongly mentioned by Said. Moreover, the depiction is so attractive, convincing and believable that readers accept the way the writers present them. In this regard, Barry (2009, p.161) says that when general readers read a piece of post-colonial text, they do not critically review the written words the way a Marxist critic does by creating a division between the ‘overt’ and the ‘covert’. Therefore, it becomes obvious for
them to believe without hesitation and such an acceptance is being criticized by Said as ‘silence’.

Such attitudes of the readers encourage Orientalist writers to continue their practices of making a contrast between the Western and the non-Western countries. Furthermore, the impact of the previous World Wars and the triumph of the European and Atlantic powers which evoked ‘power intellectual’, ‘power cultural’, and ‘power moral’ are responsible for establishing ‘the indisputable truth that Occidentals are superior to Orientals’ (Said, 1995, p.2001).

Therefore, there is no denying to the fact that “The superior ‘order’, ‘rationality’, and ‘symmetry’ of Europe, and the inferior ‘disorder’, ‘irrationality’ and ‘primitivism’ of non-Europe were the selfconfirming parameters in which the various Orientalist disciplines circulated.” (Ashcroft and Ahluwalia, 2001, p.51).