An Introduction to Edward Said - Free download as Word Doc (.doc /.docx), PDF File (.pdf), Text File (.txt) or read online for free. Wiki for Collaborative Studies of Arts, Media and Humanities. In his introduction to the term “Orientalism,” Edward Said begins by paraphrasing the writing of a French journalist’s view of the present-day Orient in order.
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979) Introduction Said starts by asserting the fact that the Orient played an instrumental role in the construction of the European culture as the powerful Other: “the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience.” (1-2) He then states that the research subject of his book is Orientalism, by which he understands a combined representation of the Orient in the Western culture, science, politics, etc. And, transcending the borders of all these field of knowledge, it becomes “a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between 'the Orient' and (most of the time) 'the Occident,'” (2) and finally it transforms into a powerful political instrument of domination: “Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” (3) As Said is a Marxist, there is no wonder that it is this third incarnation of Orientalism, domination, that he cares most of all for. In the Foucaultian tradition, Said suggests to look at Orientalism as a discourse: without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enonnously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage-and even produce-the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period. (3) He then states that the Western image of the Orient—i.e. Orientalism—had little to do with the “real” Orient.
What is more important, Orientalism is not simply the work of European imagination—it is all about power, domination, hegemony and authority. As such, Orientalism was not “simply” a collection of misrepresentations about the Orient in Europe, it “created body of theory and practice in which, for many generations, there has been a considerable material investment,” (6) material investment here meaning academic scholarship, art, literature, political writing, common sense, etc. In this way, Orientalism in the European culture became an instrument for maintaining “content” (in Gramscian terms), i.e. Voluntary reproduction by the subjects of the social reality desired by the power. In this way, Orientalism is a phenomenon of the same rank as the idea of Europe. Said then ask how relevant it is on his side to consider as one phenomenon what was supposed to be, actually, two: individual writing (particularly in case of literary fiction) and hegemonic strategies. He then goes into a lengthy explanation of why he considers this to be relevant.
First, he asserts that there is no “pure” knowledge, but rather all knowledge is shaped by ideological positions: No one has ever devised a method for detaching the scholar from the circumstances of life, from the fact of his involvement (conscious or unconscious) with a class, a set of beliefs, a social position, or from the mere activity of being a member of a society. (10) The same, he argues, is the case with literature. The link between ideology and writing is not simplistic at all, but still it is unavoidable. He describes this link in the following way: Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field that is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions; nor is it a large and diffuse collection of texts about the Orient; nor is it representative and expressive of some nefarious 'Western' imperialist plot to hold down the 'Oriental' world. It is rather a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological.
The Scope of Orientalism 1. Knowing the Oriental Said starts by analyzing public speeches and writings of two British imperialists of the early 20th century about the Egypt, making an emphasis on how the stress that since the British imperial authorities “know better” their country, they have a natural right to rule it: British knowledge of Egypt is Egypt for Balfour, and the burdens of knowledge make such questions as inferiority and superiority seem petty ones. Balfour nowhere denies British superiority and Egyptian inferiority; he takes them for granted as he describes the consequences of knowledge. (32) Any doubt in this right is dangerous, as it destroys the faith of both “Arabs” and colonial officers in what they are doing. This mode of seeing the Orient turned into the dominant political vision: The most important thing about the theory during the first decade of the twentieth century was that it worked, and worked staggeringly well. The argument, when reduced to its simplest form, was dear, it was precise, it was easy to grasp. There are Westerners, and there are Orientals.
The former dominate; the latter must be dominated, which usually means having their land occupied, their internal affairs rigidly controlled, their blood and treasure put at the disposal of one or another Western power. (36) Political domination had to be justified, therefore, in the course of the nineteenth century, a bunch of theories turn up which persisted into the twentieth century and which constructed the colonial subject as inferior to Europeans—in logic, culture, moral, etc. Many resources were invented in this vision of Oriental people, as it justified and legitimized domination: The Orient was viewed as if framed by the classroom, the criminal court, the prison, the illustrated manual. (41) The reason why this domination emerged was that at that time Britain and France, two leading colonial powers, divide between them (and other powers) the whole world, but only between them—Middle East.
In a way, they cooperated to secure cultural domination over these lands: And share they did, in ways that we shall investigate presently. What they shared, however, was not only land or profit or rule; it was the kind of intellectual power I have been calling Orientalism.
In a sense Orientalism was a library or archive of information, commonly and, in some of its aspects, unanimously held. (41) This cultural and academic project of Orientalizing the Orient was institutionalized in learned societies, academic journals, conceptual views (like Darwinism or Marxism), etc. The link between them and the Orientalism as the phenomenon for which they all worked was double-folded: they drew on Orientalism and they gradually transformed it. That it was not a transformation of liberation, but the one of intensification and improvement, is proven, according to Said, by contemporary (1970s) speeches of American politicians who reproduce in their writing the same Oriental myth of the nineteenth century. These myths are represented to us as truth, and Said asks how this situation could emerge. The answer goes in the following sections. Author: Edward W.
Said Publisher: Vintage Year: 1994 Orientalism by Edward Said is a cononical text of cultural studies in which he has challenged the concept of orientalism or the difference between east and west, as he puts it. He says that with the start of European colonization the Europeans came in contact with the lesser developed countries of the east. They found their civilization and culture very exotic, and established the science of orientalism, which was the study of the orientals or the people from these exotic civilization. Edward Said argues that the Europeans divided the world into two parts; the east and the west or the occident and the orient or the civilized and the uncivilized. This was totally an artificial boundary; and it was laid on the basis of the concept of them and us or theirs and ours.
The Europeans used orientalism to define themselves. Some particular attributes were associated with the orientals, and whatever the orientals weren’t the occidents were.
The Europeans defined themselves as the superior race compared to the orientals; and they justified their colonization by this concept. They said that it was their duty towards the world to civilize the uncivilized world. The main problem, however, arose when the Europeans started generalizing the attributes they associated with orientals, and started portraying these artificial characteristics associated with orientals in their western world through their scientific reports, literary work, and other media sources. What happened was that it created a certain image about the orientals in the European mind and in doing that infused a bias in the European attitude towards the orientals. This prejudice was also found in the orientalists (scientist studying the orientals); and all their scientific research and reports were under the influence of this.
The generalized attributes associated with the orientals can be seen even today, for example, the Arabs are defined as uncivilized people; and Islam is seen as religion of the terrorist. Here is a brief summary of the book, followed by a critique by Malcolm Kerr.
Chapter 1: The Scope of Orientalism In this chapter, Edward Said explains how the science of orientalism developed and how the orientals started considering the orientals as non-human beings. The orientals divided the world in to two parts by using the concept of ours and theirs.
An imaginary geographical line was drawn between what was ours and what was theirs. The orients were regarded as uncivilized people; and the westerns said that since they were the refined race it was their duty to civilize these people and in order to achieve their goal, they had to colonize and rule the orients. They said that the orients themselves were incapable of running their own government. The Europeans also thought that they had the right to represent the orientals in the west all by themselves. In doing so, they shaped the orientals the way they perceived them or in other words they were orientalizing the orients. Various teams have been sent to the east where the orientalits silently observed the orientals by living with them; and every thing the orientals said and did was recorded irrespective of its context, and projected to the civilized world of the west. This resulted in the generalization.
Whatever was seen by the orientals was associated with the oriental culture, no matter if it is the irrational action of an individual. The most important use of orientalism to the Europeans was that they defined themselves by defining the orientals. For example, qualities such as lazy, irrational, uncivilized, crudeness were related to the orientals, and automatically the Europeans became active, rational, civilized, sophisticated. Thus, in order to achieve this goal, it was very necessary for the orientalists to generalize the culture of the orients. Another feature of orientalism was that the culture of the orientals was explained to the European audience by linking them to the western culture, for example, Islam was made into Mohammadism because Mohammad was the founder of this religion and since religion of Christ was called Christianity; thus Islam should be called Mohammadism.
The point to be noted here is that no Muslim was aware of this terminology and this was a completely western created term, and to which the Muslims had no say at all. Chapter 2: Orientalist Structures and Restructures In this chapter, Edward Said points the slight change in the attitude of the Europeans towards the orientals. The orientals were really publicized in the European world especially through their literary work. Oriental land and behaviour was highly romanticized by the European poets and writers and then presented to the western world. The orientalists had made a stage strictly for the European viewers, and the orients were presented to them with the colour of the orientalist or other writers perception.
In fact, the orient lands were so highly romanticized that western literary writers found it necessary to offer pilgrimage to these exotic lands of pure sun light and clean oceans in order to experience peace of mind, and inspiration for their writing. The east was now perceived by the orientalist as a place of pure human culture with no necessary evil in the society. Actually it was this purity of the orientals that made them inferior to the clever, witty, diplomatic, far-sighted European; thus it was their right to rule and study such an innocent race. The Europeans said that these people were too naive to deal with the cruel world, and that they needed the European fatherly role to assist them. Another justification the Europeans gave to their colonization was that they were meant to rule the orientals since they have developed sooner than the orientals as a nation, which shows that they were biologically superior, and secondly it were the Europeans who discovered the orients not the orients who discovered the Europeans.
Darwin’s theories were put forward to justify their superiority, biologically by the Europeans. In this chapter, Edward Said also explains how the two most renowned orientalists of the 19th century, namely Silvestre de Sacy and Ernest Renan worked and gave orienatlism a new dimension.
In fact, Edward Said compliments the contribution made by Sacy in the field. He says that Sacy organized the whole thing by arranging the information in such a way that it was also useful for the future orientalist. And secondly, the prejudice that was inherited by every orientalist was considerably low in him. On the other hand, Renan who took advantage of Sacy’s work was as biased as any previous orientalist.
He believed that the science of orientalism and the science of philology have a very important relation; and after Renan this idea was given a lot attention and many future orientalists worked of in its line.
Said starts by asserting the fact that the Orient played an instrumental role in the construction of the European culture as the powerful Other: “the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience.” (1-2) He then states that the research subject of his book is Orientalism, by which he understands a combined representation of the Orient in the Western culture, science, politics, etc. And, transcending the borders of all these field of knowledge, it becomes “a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between 'the Orient' and (most of the time) 'the Occident,'” (2) and finally it transforms into a powerful political instrument of domination: “Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” (3) As Said is a Marxist, there is no wonder that it is this third incarnation of Orientalism, domination, that he cares most of all for. He then states that the Western image of the Orient—i.e. Orientalism—had little to do with the “real” Orient. What is more important, Orientalism is not simply the work of European imagination—it is all about power, domination, hegemony and authority. As such, Orientalism was not “simply” a collection of misrepresentations about the Orient in Europe, it “created body of theory and practice in which, for many generations, there has been a considerable material investment,” (6) material investment here meaning academic scholarship, art, literature, political writing, common sense, etc. In this way, Orientalism in the European culture became an instrument for maintaining “content” (in Gramscian terms), i.e.
Voluntary reproduction by the subjects of the social reality desired by the power. In this way, Orientalism is a phenomenon of the same rank as the idea of Europe. Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field that is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions; nor is it a large and diffuse collection of texts about the Orient; nor is it representative and expressive of some nefarious 'Western' imperialist plot to hold down the 'Oriental' world. The most important thing about the theory during the first decade of the twentieth century was that it worked, and worked staggeringly well. The argument, when reduced to its simplest form, was dear, it was precise, it was easy to grasp. There are Westerners, and there are Orientals.
The former dominate; the latter must be dominated, which usually means having their land occupied, their internal affairs rigidly controlled, their blood and treasure put at the disposal of one or another Western power. This cultural and academic project of Orientalizing the Orient was institutionalized in learned societies, academic journals, conceptual views (like Darwinism or Marxism), etc.
Edward Said Orientalism Introduction Pdf
The link between them and the Orientalism as the phenomenon for which they all worked was double-folded: they drew on Orientalism and they gradually transformed it. That it was not a transformation of liberation, but the one of intensification and improvement, is proven, according to Said, by contemporary (1970s) speeches of American politicians who reproduce in their writing the same Oriental myth of the nineteenth century. These myths are represented to us as truth, and Said asks how this situation could emerge. The answer goes in the following sections. Said then discusses that all geographies are imaginative and moves on to inspect the imaginative geography of the Orient: “Almost from earliest times in Europe the Orient was something more than what was empirically known about it.” (55) Already in ancient Greece, “a line drawn between two continents.
Europe is powerful and articulate; Asia is defeated and distant.” (57) “It is Europe that articulates the Orient; this articulation is the prerogative, not of a puppet master, but of a genuine creator, whose life-giving power represents, animates, constitutes the otherwise silent and dangerous space beyond familiar boundaries.” (57). Despite Napoleon’s military failure, his “occupation gave birth to the entire modern experience of the Orient as interpreted from within the universe of discourse founded by Napoleon in Egypt, whose agencies of domination and dissemination included the Institut and the Description After Napoleon, then, the very language of Orientalism changed radically.
Its descriptive realism was upgraded and became not merely a style of representation but a language, indeed a means of creation.” (87) It gave birth to multiple literary works about the Orient that Said discusses later in the section. A text purporting to contain knowledge about something actual, and arising out of circumstances similar to the ones I have just described, is not easily dismissed. Expertise is attributed to it. The authority of academics, institutions, and governments can accrue to it, surrounding it with still greater prestige than its practical successes warrant.
Most important, such texts can create not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe. In time such knowledge and reality produce a tradition, or what Michel Foucault calls a discourse, whose material presence or weight, not the originality of a given author, is really responsible for the texts produced out of it. Orientalism overrode the Orient.
As a system of thought about the Orient, it always rose from the specifically human detail to the general transhuman one; an observation about a tenth-century Arab poet multiplied itself into a policy towards (and about) the Oriental mentality in Egypt, Iraq, or Arabia. Similarly a verse from the Koran would be considered the best evidence of an ineradicable Muslim sensuality.
Orientalism assumed an unchanging Orient, absolutely different (the reasons change from epoch to epoch) from the West. As a judge of the Orient, the modern Orientalist does not, as he believes and even says, stand apart from it objectively. His human detachment, whose sign is the absence of sympathy covered by professional knowledge, is weighted heavily with all the orthodox attitudes, perspectives, and moods of Orienlalism that I have been describing. His Orient is not the Orient as it is, but the Orient as it has been Orientalized. An unbroken arc of knowledge and power connects the European or Western statesman and the Western Orientalists; it forms the rim of the stage containing the Orient.
This situation dominated more or less academia, cultural and political spheres until the end of the Second World War. After it, the political situation changed radically, as Eastern nations acquired independence, while the Cold War divided the world between two new superpowers. Unable to recognize 'its' Orient in the new Third World, Orientalism now faced a challenging and politically armed Orient.
(104) Two alternatives arose: to pretend as if nothing had changed, or to adapt old ways to the new. Yet, in general, Orientalism was now in crisis. “National liberation movements in the ex-colonial Orient worked havoc with Orientalist conceptions of passive, fatalistic subject races,” (105) in addition, there came an understanding that the entire conceptual apparatus of Orientalism was out-dated. The modern Orientatist was, in his view, a hero rescuing the Orient from the obscurity, alienation, and strangeness which he himself had properly distinguished. His research reconstructed the Orient's lost languages, mores, even mentalities In the process, the Orient and Orientalist disciplines changed dialectically, for they could not survive in their original form Yet both bore the traces of power—power to have resurrected, indeed created, the Orient, power that dwelt in the new, scientifically advanced techniques of philology and of anthropological generalization.
Modern Orientalism embodies a systematic discipline of accumulation. And far from this being exclusively an intellectual or theoretical feature, it made Orientalism fatally tend towards the systematic accumulation of human beings and territories.
To reconstruct a dead or lost Oriental language meant ultimately to reconstruct a dead or neglected Orient; it also meant that reconstructive precision, science, even imagination could prepare the way for what armies, administrations, and bureaucracies would later do on the ground, in the Orient. In a sense, the vindication of Orientalism was not only its intellectual or artistic successes but its later effectiveness, its usefulness, its authority.
The second scholar under scrutiny, Ernest Renan, is remarkable for having “associated the Orient with the most recent comparative disciplines, of which philology was one of the most eminent.” (130) His initial project was to recreated the Semitic protolanguage, which made him a distinguished authority in this field. In doing so, he actually constructed his object, because the Semitic protolanguage cannot, unlike living or even dead written languages, be observed. In doing so, he was quite reactionary. Narrative structures were employed to make coherent a huge mass of random facts about the Orient into texts which “tamed” the Orient and imposed upon it the European vision.
Said discusses books about Mohammad published in the 19 th century as examples. He then moves on to analyze Karl Marx’s writing about the Orient. Said notes that Marx is undoubtedly sympathetic about the Orient, but when it comes to conceptualizing his insights into contemporary political language, the Orientalist vocabulary starts to shape his writing about India (that particular example). That Marx was still able to sense some fellow feeling, to identify even a little with poor Asia, suggests that something happened before the labels took over, before he was dispatched to Goethe as a source of wisdom on the Orient.
It is as if the individual mind (Marx's, in this -case) could find a precollective, preofficial individuality in Asia—find and give in to its pressures upon his emotions, feelings, senses—only to give it up when he confronted a more formidable censor in the very vocabulary he found himself forced to employ. Said then analyzes another important factor in the formation of Orientalism, the writing about the Orient while being there in residence.
Said claims that the cultural structures of Orientalism were so strong that Europeans who came to the Orient to get a “first-hand experience” actually imposed already existing meanings on what they encountered there. He makes a thorough analysis of Edward William Lane's Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836). He notes, first, that Lane pretended to be Muslim in order to gain a better access to the Egyptian culture—a fact of domination itself, as.
On the one hand, Orientalism acquired the Orient as literally and as widely as possible; on the other, it domesticated this knowledge to the West, filtering it through regulatory codes, classifications, specimen cases, periodical reviews, dictionaries, grammars, commentaries, editions, translations, all of which together formed a simulacrum of the Orient and reproduced it materially in the West, for the West. The Orient, in short, would be converted from the personal, sometimes garbled testimony of intrepid voyagers and residents into impersonal definition by a whole array of scientific workers. It would be converted from the consecutive experience of individual research into a sort of imaginary museum without walls, where everything gathered from the huge distances and varieties of Oriental culture became categorically Oriental. It would be reconverted, restructured from the bundle of fragments brought back piecemeal by explorers, expeditions, commissions, armies, and merchants into lexicographical, bibliographical, departmentalized, and textualized Orientalist sense. Consequently French pilgrims from Volney on planned and projected for, imagined, ruminated about places that were principally in their minds; they constructed schemes for a typically French, perhaps even a European, concert in the Orient, which of course they supposed would be orchestrated by them. Theirs was the Orient of memories, suggestive ruins, forgotten secrets, hidden correspondences, and an almost virtuosic style of being an Orient whose highest literary forms would be found in Nerval and Flaubert, both of whose work was solidly fixed in an imaginative. Unrealizable (except aesthetically) dimension.
Non-fiction
I n system of knowledge about the Orient, the Orient is less a place than a topos, a set of references, a congeries of characteristics, that seems to have its origin in a quotation, or a fragment of a text, or a citation from someone's work on the Orient, or some bit of previous imagining, or an amalgam of all these. Direct observation or circumstantial description of the Orient are the fictions presented by writing on the Orient, yet invariably these are totally secondary to systematic tasks of another sort. In Lamartine, Nerval, and Flaubert, the Orient is a re-presentation of canonical material guided by an aesthetic and executive will capable of producing interest in the reader. Yet in all three writers, Orientalism or some aspect of it is asserted, even though, as I said earlier, the narrative consciousness is given a very large role to play. What we shall see is that for all its eccentric individuality, this narrative consciousness will end up by being aware, like Bouvard and Pecuchet, that pilgrimage is after all a form of copying. It is as if having failed both in his search for a stable Oriental reality and in his intent to give systematic order to his re-presentation of the Orient, Nerval was employing the borrowed authority of a canonized Orientalist text. After his voyage the earth remained dead, and aside from its brilliantly crafted but fragmented embodiments in the Voyage, his self was no less drugged and worn out than before.
Therefore the Orient seemed retrospectively to belong to a negative realm, in which failed narratives, disordered chronicles, mere transcription of scholarly texts, were its only possible vessel. At least Nerval did not try to save his project by wholeheartedly giving himself up to French designs on the Orienl, although he did resort to Orientalism to make some of his points. Even the most innocuous travel book—and there were literally hundreds written after mid-century—contributed to the density of public awareness of the Orient; a heavily marked dividing line separated the delights, miscellaneous exploits, and testimonial portentousness of individual pilgrims in the East (which included some American voyagers, among them Mark Twain and Herman Melville) from the authoritative reports of scholarly travelers, missionaries, governmental functionaries, and other expert witnesses.
He concludes by addressing Richard Burton's Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to AI-Madinah and Meccah (1855-1856), which he regards as a transitional form of between “between Orientalist genres represented on the one hand by Lane and on the other by the French writers.” (194) Burton, who was highly sympathetic with the Arabs, still promotes, according to Said, the Orientalist project, as he invests his knowledge in the European understanding—and, consequently, structuring—of the Oriental societies. Burton was an imperialist, for all his sympathetic self-association with the Arabs; but what is more relevant is that Burton thought of himself both as a rebel against authority (hence his identification with the East as a place of freedom from Victorian moral authority) and as a potential agent of authority in the East. It is the manner of that coexistence, between two antagonistic roles for himself, that is of interest. (195) “The problem finally reduces itself to the problem of knowledge of the Orient, which is why a consideration of Burton's Orientalism ought to conclude our account of Orientalist structures and restructures in most of the nineteenth century.” (195).
What we read in his prose is the history of a consciousness negotiating its way through an alien culture by virtue of having successfully absorbed its systems of information and behavior. Burton's freedom was in having shaken himself loose of his European origins enough to be able to live as an Oriental. Every scene in the Pilgrimage reveals him as winning out over the obstacles confronting him, a foreigner, in a strange place. He was able to do this because he had sufficient knowledge of an alien society for this purpose. The work of predecessors, the institutional life of a scholarly field, the collective nature of any learned enterprise: these, to say nothing of economic and social circumstances, tend to diminish the effects of the individual scholar's production. A field like Orientalism has a cumulative and corporate identity, one that is particularly strong given its associations with traditional learning (the classics, the Bible, philology), public institutions (governments, trading companies, geographical societies, universities), and generically determined writing (travel books, books of exploration, fantasy, exotic description).
The result for Orientalism has been a sort of consensus: certain things, certain types of statement, certain types of work have seemed for the Orientalist correct. He has built his work and research upon them, and they in tum have pressed hard upon new writers and scholars. Orientalism can thus be regarded as a ma n ner of regularized (or Orientalized) writing, vision, and study, dominated by imperatives, perspectives, and ideological biases ostensibly suited to the Orient.
The Orient is taught, researched, administered, and pronounced upon in certain discrete ways. What matters more immediately is the peculiar epistemological framework through which the Orient was seen, and out of which the Powers acted. For despite their differences, the British and the French saw the Orient as a geographical-and cultural, political, demographical, sociological, and historical-entity over whose destiny they believed themselves to have traditional entitlement.
The Orient to them was no sudden discovery, no mere historical accident, but an area to the east of Europe whose principal worth was uniformly defined in terms of Europe, more particularly in tenos specifically claiming for Europe-European science, scholarship, understanding, and administration-the credit for having made the Orient what it was now. And this had been the achievement-inadvertent or not is beside the point-of modern Orientalism. The second method by which Orientalism delivered the Orient to the West was the result of an important convergence. For decades the Orientalists had spoken about the Orient, they had translated texts, they had explained civilizations, religions, dynasties, cultures, mentalities-as academic objects, screened off from Europe by virtue of their inimitable foreignness The Orienlalist remained outside the Orient, which, however much it was made to appear intelligible, remained beyond the Occident. This cultural, temporal, and geographical distance was expressed in metaphors of depth, secrecy, and sexual promise Yet the distance between Orient and Occident was, almost paradoxically, in the process of being reduced throughout the nineteenth century.
As the commercial, political, and other existential encounters between East and West increased, a tension developed between the dogmas of latent Orientalism, with its support in studies of the 'classical' Orient, and the descriptions of a present, modern, manifest Orient Orientalism now articulated by travelers, pilgrims, statesmen, and the like. At some moment impossible to determine precisely, the tension caused a convergence of the two types of Orientalism. Being a White Man was therefore an idea and a reality. It involved a reasoned position towards both the white and the non-white worlds. It meant-in the colonies-speaking in a certain way, behaving according to a code of regulations, and even feeling certain things and not others. It meant specific judgments, evaluations, gestures.
It was a form of authority before which nonwhites, and even whites themselves, were expected to bend. In the institutional forms it took (colonial governments, consular corps, commercial establishments) it was an agency for the expression, diffusion, and implementation of policy towards the world, and within this agency, although a certain personal latitude was allowed, the impersonal communal idea of being a White Man ruled. Being a White Man, in short, was a very concrete manner of being-in-theworld, a way of taking hold of reality, language, and thought. It made a specific style possible.
In literary narratives, this opposition revealed by regular moralizations and judgements on the nature of the superiority of Europeans over Orientals. Consequently, Orientals in these narratives were downgraded to literary characters constructed according to the laws of the genre, not on the basis of “reality.” To exercise of this opposition, a special vocabulary and epistemological instruments were elaborated, which were facilitated by “method, tradition and politics all working together.” (230). The scholarly investigator took a type marked 'Oriental' for the same thing as any individual Oriental he might encounter.
Years of tradition had encrusted discourse about such matters as the Semitic or Oriental spirit with some legitimacy. And political good sense taught, in Bell's marvelous phrase, that in the East 'it all hangs together.' Primitiveness therefore inhered in the Orient, was the Orient, an idea to which anyone dealing with or writing about the Orient had to return, as if to a touchstone outlasting time or experience. Against this static system of 'synchronic essentialism' I have caned vision because it presumes that the whole Orient can be seen panoptically, there is a constant pressure. The source of pressure is narrative, in that if any Oriental detail can be shown to move, or to develop, diachrony is introduced into the system. What seemed stable-and the Orient is synonymous with stability and unchanging eternality-now appears unstable. Instability suggests that history, with its disruptive detail, its currents of change, its tendency towards growth, decline, or dramatic movement, is possible in the Orient and for the Orient.
History and the narrative by which history is represented argue that vision is insufficient, that 'the Orient' as an unconditional ontological category does an injustice to the potential of reality for change. Moreover, narrative is the specific form taken by written history to counter the pennanence of vision.
Lane sensed the dangers of narrative when he refused to give linear shape to himself and to his information, preferring instead the monumental form of encyclopedic or lexicographical vision. Narrative asserts the power of men to be born, develop, and die, the tendency of institutions and actualities to change, the likelihood that modernity and contemporaneity will finally overtake 'classical' civilizations; above all, it asserts that the domination of reality by vision is no more than a will to power, a will to truth and interpretation, and not an objective condition of history. Narrative, in short, introduces an opposing point of view, perspective, consciousness to the unitary web of vision When as a result of World War 1 the Orient was made to enter history, it was the Orientalist-as-agent who did the work. In the period between the wars, as we can easily judge from, say, Malraux's novels, the relations between East and West assumed a currency that was both widespread and anxious.
The signs of Oriental claims for political independence were everywhere; certainly in the dismembered Ottoman Empire they were encouraged by the Allies and, as is perfectly evident in the whole Arab Revolt and its aftermath, quickly became problematic. The Orient now appeared to constitute a challenge, not just to the West in general, but to the West's spirit, knowledge, and. Europe's effort therefore was to maintain itself as what Valery called 'une machine puissante,' absorbing what it could from outside Europe, converting everything to its use, intellectually and materially, keeping the Orient selectively organized (or disorganized). Yet this could be done only through clarity of vision and analysis. Unless the Orient was seen for what it was, its power-military, material, spiritual-would sooner or later overwhelm Europe.
The great colonial empires, great systems of systematic repression, existed to fend off the feared eventuality. Colonial subjects, as George Orwell saw them in Marrakech in 1939, must not be seen except as a kind of continental emanation, African, Asian, Oriental (251). No longer did it go without much controversy that Europe's domination over the Orient was almost a fact of nature; nor was it assumed that the Orient was in need of Western enlightenment.
What mattered during the interwar years was a cultural self-definition that transcended the provincial and the xenophobic. For Gibb, the West has need of the Orient as something to be studied because it releases the spirit from sterile specialization, it eases the affliction of excessive parochial and nationalistic self-centeredness, it increases one's grasp of the really central issues in the study of culture. If the Orient appears more a partner in this new rising dialectic of cultural self-consciousness, it is, first, because the Orient is more of a challenge now than it was before, and second, because the West is entering a relatively new phase of cultural crisis, caused in part by the diminishment of Western suzerainty over the rest of the world. At its best, Massignon's vision of the East-West encounter assigned great responsibility to the West for its invasion of the East, its colonialism, its relentless attacks on Islam.
Massignon was a tireless fighter on behalf of Muslim civilization and, as his numerous essays and letters after 1948 testify, in support of Palestinian refugees, in the defense of Arab Muslim and Christian rights in Palestine against Zionism, against what, with reference to something said by Abba Eban, he scathingly called Israeli 'bourgeois colonialism.' Yet the framework in which Massignon's vision was held also assigned the Islamic Orient to an essentially ancient time and the West to modernity.
Like Robertson Smith, Massignon considered the Oriental to be not a modern man but a Semite; this reductive category had a powerful grip on his thought. Said then looks at Gibb “as the culmination of a specific academic tradition, what-to use an expression that does not occur in Polk's prose-we can call an academic-research consensus or paradigm.” (274-275) Gibb was an “insider” of the Western academia, therefore, “The Orient for Gibb was not a place one encountered directly; it was something one read about, studied, wrote about within the confines of learned societies, the university, the scholarly conference.” (275) For Gibbs, Islam is, too, the dominant structure organizing the entire life of Near Eastern communities. In this section, Said focuses on the Orientalist influences in the American culture, academia and politics. He starts by considering cultural stereotypes about Arabs, which were strengthened by the confrontation of Arab states with Israel and with the use of oil as a lever of pressure. “In the films and television the Arab is associated either with lechery or bloodthirsty dishonesty.” (286) Another example: “A survey entitled The Arabs in American Tex/books reveals the most astonishing misinformation, or rather the most callous representations of an ethnic-religious group.” (287). (a) the extent to which the European tradition of Orientalist scholarship was, if not taken over, then accommodated, normalized, domesticated, and popularized and fed into the postwar efflorescence of Near Eastern studies in the United States; and (b) the extent to which the European tradition has given rise in the United States to a coherent attitude among most scholars, institutions, styles of discourse, and orientations, despite the contemporary appearance of refinement, as well as the use of (again) highly sophisticated-appearing social-science techniques. But the principal dogmas of Orientalism exist in their purest form today in studies of the Arabs and Islam.
Let us recapitulate them here: one is the absolute and systematic difference between the West, which is rational, developed, humane, superior, and the Orient, which is aberrant. Undeveloped, inferior. Another dogma is that abstractions about the Orient, particularly those based on texts representing a 'classical' Oriental civilization, are always preferable to direct evidence drawn from modern Oriental realities. A third dogma is that the Orient is eternal, uniform, and incapable of defining itself; therefore it is assumed that a highly generalized and systematic vocabulary for describing the Orient from a Western standpoint is inevitable and even scientifically 'objective.' A fourth dogma is that the Orient is at bottom something either to be feared (the Yellow Peril, the Mongol hordes, the brown dominions) or to be controlled (by pacification, research and development, outright occupation whenever possible). Said then analyzes the contemporary right wing discourse, which is a priori anti-Oriental due to its inherent Orientalism: “And so it is throughout the work of the contemporary Orientalist; assertions of the most bizarre sort dot his or her pages, whether it is a Manfred Halpern arguing that even though all human thought processes can be reduced to eight, the Islamic mind is capable of only four, or a Morroe Berger presuming that since the Arabic language is much given to rhetoric Arabs are consequentl y incapable of true thought. (310) However, here in this chapter, as well as in the previous one, his analysis becomes somewhat weaker than before, as he generalizes less and the details overwhelm the picture.
Perhaps, this is because the contemporary criticism is too personal.