A man of great intellect and courage, Edward Said (1935-2003) taught English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. This Palestinian writer and activist was widely respected for his ground-breaking research in the field of comparative literature and on his incisive political commentary. As well, he wrote classical music criticism for The Nation and political commentary for such publications as the Guardian, Le Monde Diplomatique, and al-Hayat, the Arab-language daily, which is printed in every Arab capital in the world.
He was born in Jerusalem, and with his family he emigrated (1948) to Cairo, about the time Israel declared its independence and the Arab-Israeli war began. The family moved (1950) to the New York, so that he could attended college. Later, Said studied at Princeton and Harvard, where he graduated Ph.D. in 1964. Most of his academic career was spent in New York as a professor at Columbia, but he was also a visiting professor at many leading universities.
Like Noam Chomsky, he became an intellectual of the first rank. Both activists more or less see the public role of the intellectual in terms of being the outsider, the amateur, and the disturber of the status quo. Both critique the media as impediments to an understanding of what governments actually do behind closed doors, thereby promoting a sense of resistance. He lectured at more than 150 universities and colleges in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Because of his advocacy for Palestinian self-determination and his membership in the Palestine National Council, he was only latterly allowed to visit Palestine.
Said published many important books, including Orientalism (1978), a critique of the Eurocentrism that had come to typify Oriental studies; The World, the Text and the Critic (1983); Blaming the Victims (1988); Culture and Imperialism (1993), and Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process (1995). His most recent book, Out of Place: A Memoir (1999), was published by Alfred A. Knopf.
Editors' note: This ground-breaking critique of a set of beliefs known as "Orientalism" forms an important background for such fields as Cultural Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Postcolonial Studies, which have been gaining prominence since the 1970s. Said highlights the inaccuracies of a wide range of assumptions underlying Orientalist thinking; he uncovers the operations of power in the Eurocentric constructions of the "Orient" across many sites of knowledge production, thereby helping us appreciate the global dimensions of "race" and "otherness" (Gray and McGuigan, 1997, p. 2).
1. introduction
To some extent, the Orient was a European invention; since antiquity, the Orient has been a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, and remarkable experiences. By the mid-seventies, it was disappearing. Perhaps it seemed irrelevant that Orientals themselves might have an interest in the process. The main thing for the European visitor was a European representation of the area. By contrast, Americans feel differently about the Orient, which (for them) is associated with the Far East (China and Japan especially). For one thing, they do not regard the Middle East as the Orient (p. 42).
2. my project
Unlike the Americans, the French and the British--less so the Germans, Russians, Spanish, Portuguese, Italians, and Swiss--have a long tradition of Orientalism, a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient's special place in European Western experience (P. 42).
The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe's greatest/richest/oldest colonies, the source of its civilization (especially language), its cultural contestant, and recurring image of the "Other." In addition, the Orient had helped define Europe (or the West) as its controlling image, idea, personality, experience. Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies (p. 42). By contrast, the American understanding of the Orient seems less dense; the American political and economic role in the Near East (the Middle East) affects our understanding of the Orient (pp. 42-43).
3. approach(es)
We can identify three designations for the term orientalism. These include
Area Studies
Note that the anthropologist, sociologist, historian, or philologist uses the term. We think of Oriental Studies or Area Studies. True, specialists regard the term as too vague, if not too general, because it suggests the high-handed executive attitude of 19th-century and early 20th-century colonialism (p. 43).
a style of thought
The term Orientalism also designates a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction, as in "the Orient" and "the Occident." Many writers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators work with this distinction between the East and the West.
a discourse
Since the late 18th century, the term has designated the corporate institution (a discourse) for dealing with the Orient, i.e., a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and exerting authority over it. My contention is that, without examining Orientalism as a discourse, one cannot understand the systematic discipline by which European culture was able to produce and manage the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period (pp. 43-44). This book argues that European culture gained strength as well as identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate self (p. 44).
4. findings
Franco-British and American involvement in the Orient varied qualitatively and quantitatively. Orientalism derives from a particular closeness experienced between Britain and France and the Orient. From the beginning of the 19th century until the end of WW II, Britain and France dominated the Orient; since the end of WW II, America has dominated the area. My assumption is that the Orient is not an inert fact of nature. Like the West, the Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought that has given it reality and presence in and for the West.
some qualifications
It is wrong to think that the Orient was (a) essentially an idea (or a creation) with no corresponding reality. In fact, many Western scholars have found the East to be an all-consuming passion (pp. 44-45). In addition, (b) ideas, culture, and histories cannot be understood apart from configurations of power. The relationship between the Occident and the Orient is a relationship of power. One should never assume that (c) the structure of Orientalism is nothing more than a structure of lies or myths. Orientalism is valuable as a sign of European-Atlantic power over the Orient (p. 45).
Antonio Gramsci distinguished between civil and political society, the one made up of voluntary affiliations and the other state institutions (the police say) whose role in the polity is direct domination. We find culture in civil society, where the influence of ideas, institutions, etc., works through consensus (p. 46).
In any society not totalitarian, certain cultural forms predominate over others, just as certain ideas are more influential than others. Gramsci calls this form of (cultural) leadership "hegemony." This concept is indispensable for understanding life in the industrial West. Hegemony/the result of cultural hegemony gives Orientalism the durability we've been talking about. Orientalism is never far from the idea of Europe, a collective notion identifying "us" Europeans from "those" non-Europeans. Orientalism depends for its strategy on this flexible political superiority, which puts the West in a whole series of relationships with the Orient without losing the upper hand.
my contemporary reality
I see three ways out of the difficulties mentioned above:
(a) distinguishing pure and political knowledge
Distinguishing pure from political knowledge is never straightforward. It is easy to argue that knowledge about Shakespeare and Wordsworth (say) is not political, whereas knowledge of contemporary China or Russia is. We demand that knowledge be non-political, i.e., scholarly, academic, impartial, but in practice the matter is problematic. Orientalism is not a mere political subject that is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions; it is a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, romantic, sociological, historical, and philosophical texts; it is an elaboration of a whole series of "interests" (pp. 47-48).
Each humanistic investigation must formulate the nature of the connection between knowledge and politics in the specific context of the study/the subject matter, and its historical circumstances (p. 49).
(b) methodological question
For some time, I have been interested in a problem that has plagued the human sciences, i.e., formulating a first step, the point of departure, thereby marking off what should be included in a study and what should be excluded. We have to make a beginning for each project in such a way as to enable what follows. We are especially conscious of this problem in the study of Orientalism (p. 49).
The idea of "beginning," indeed the act of beginning, involves an act of delimitation by which something is cut out of a great mass of material and which stands for a starting point. Students of texts can utilize Louis Althusser's principle of the problematic, i.e., the concern which unifies a text or a group of texts. In the case of Orientalism, we face not only the problem of finding a point of departure, a problematic, but also the question of selecting texts, authors, and periods.
What German Orientalism had in common with Anglo-French and later American Orientalism was a kind of intellectual authority over the Orient in Western culture. This authority must in large part be the subject of any description of Orientalism. Even the name Orientalism suggests a serious, perhaps ponderous style of expertise; when I apply it to modern American social scientists (they do not call themselves Orientalists), I draw attention to the way Middle East experts draw on the vestiges of Orientalism's intellectual position in the 19th century (p. 49). Authority is instrumental; it is persuasive; it is virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true and from traditions, perceptions, and judgements (pp. 49-50).
We can use two methodological devices (critical techniques) to study the authority (or the soundness) of the views expressed in these texts (p. 50):
Everyone who writes about the Orient must locate himself or herself vis-a-vis the Orient; translated into the text, this location includes the kind of narrative voice adopted, the type of structure built, the kinds of images, themes, motifs circulated in the text: all of which add up to a deliberate way of addressing the reader.
As well, every writer on the Orient assumes some Oriental precedent, some previous knowledge of the Orient, to which he or she refers and upon which he or she relies. The ensemble of relationships between works, audiences, and aspects of the Orient therefore constitutes an analyzable formation.
With regard to cultural discourse, we must remember the following lesson: What is commonly circulated by a culture is not "truth" but "representations" (that is, social constructions): language is a highly organized and encoded system, which employs many devices to express, indicate, and exchange messages and information (p. 50).
(c) the personal dimension
I grew up "Oriental" in two British colonies. All my education in those colonies (Palestine and Egypt) and in the USA has been Western. I study the traces of Orientalism upon me, the Oriental subject (p. 51). Three considerations have helped make the simplest perception of the Arabs and Islam into a highly politicized matter: the history of popular anti-Arab and anti-Islamic prejudice in the West, which is immediately reflected in the history of Orientalism; the struggle between the Arabs and Israeli Zionism and its effect upon American Jews as well as upon both the liberal culture and the population at large; and the almost total absence of any cultural position making it possible either to identify with or dispassionately to discuss the Arabs or Islam (pp. 51-52).
5. concluding remarks
Thanks to the politics, oil economics, and the simple-minded dichotomy of freedom-loving democratic Israel and evil, totalitarian, and terrorist Arabs, establishing a clear view of the Near East has become difficult. My experiences in these matters made me write this book. The life of an Arab Palestinian in the West is rather disheartening, for the web of racism, cultural stereotypes, political imperialism, and so on is very strong. The nexus of knowledge and power that creates "the Oriental" and in a sense establishes him as a human being is not (for me) an exclusively academic matter. I have been able to put to use my humanistic and political concern for the development and consolidation of Orientalism (p. 52).
Said, Edward W. 1978. "Orientalism." In Studies in Culture: An Introductory Reader, ed. Ann Gray and Jim McGuigan. London: Arnold, 1997, pp. 42-53.