As an adjective the word qualifies anything belonging to the East e. Oriental landscape, literature, attitude, etc. Said also makes it clear that he is not attempting to cover the whole area. The period he covers in his book extends from the late eighteenth century to the present. Some of these are:. Second, Orientalism is a field of academic research that includes everyone who teaches, investigates, and writes about the Orient. Therefore, through Orientalism, the West took it upon itself to represent the Orient and by doing so opened it to exploitation.
The very purpose of Orientalism is to take control of the Orient and take away from it any ability to speak for itself. Said maintained that it is the stereotypes and prejudices that determine the Western representation of the Orient.
Foucault defined discourse as a system of thought that governs the knowledge obtained by a person. This knowledge is a paraphrase of preconceived notions and ideas. So, a discourse is the product of interaction between power and knowledge interconnected in a never-ending circle. Edward Said, following the ideas of Foucault, focused on the relationship between power and knowledge. In Orientalism , Edward Said builds up his argument and analysis in three 3 long chapters. Moreover, it also covers the subject in terms of political as well as philosophical themes.
According to him, the East was viewed as a textual universe for the West. The European Orientalists had keen interest in classical rather than contemporary periods of the Eastern culture. In this chapter, Said traces the development of modern Orientalism by presenting a broadly chronological description.
He also attempts to trace it by describing a set of devices usually common to the works of popular artists, poets, and scholars. Said presents a review of the French and English traditions of the study of Muslim Near East during the 19th century and further up to the world war I.
Furthermore, in this chapter, Edward Said endeavors to demonstrate how Orientalism has influenced and affected the Western perceptions of the Arab Middle East and Middle Eastern perceptions of themselves. This chapter of Orientalism begins at the point where its predecessor had left off. It means around This period is characterized with great colonial expansion into the Orient, culminating in the second world war.
The last section of this chapter characterizes the shift from British and French to American hegemony. It presents the current social and intellectual realities of Orientalism in the USA. For this purpose, he reviews the careers of leading Islamicists of that time like French scholar Lovis Massignon and the English historian Hamilton Gibb. According to him, they helped to perpetuate the dynamics of Orientalism in their representation of Islam and Arabs in four categories.
These four categories are:. In this category, Said discusses the popular images and social science representations of the East. Do not hesitate to give them our contact information: OpenEdition - Freemium Department access openedition. C - F Marseille You can also fill in the form below with, which will enable us to forward your librarians your suggestion of acquisition.
Thank you. We will forward your request to your library as soon as possible. OpenEdition is a web platform for electronic publishing and academic communication in the humanities and social sciences. Desktop version Mobile version. Penser l'Orient Youssef Courbage. Search inside the book. Table of contents. Cite Share. Cited by. Discourses of Orientalism?
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Size: small x px Medium x px Large x px. Orientalism often continues to be regarded as dangerous, perhaps in particular by those who have never read it. Such is the meretricious message which, without much elaboration, and without any obvious mental effort, remains as potent with some audiences as it did 30 years ago.
It also is worth noting that the personal tone of the book helped to make things even worse. The author himself, his reasons for writing the book, his genuine offense at the way Arabs and Muslim are objectified in such a reductionist way, is powerfully present in the text. All this has had unfortunate consequences. Hence it provides a reason for not taking the work of a huge number of scholars of the Middle East with the academic respect it deserves, even when, as in the case of most social scientists at least, their work has little or nothing to do with Orientalism, either in praise or blame.
By the same token, it allows those who still practice some version of an Orientalist approach to insulate themselves, and their students, from a powerful, alternative, point of view. More seriously, the ad hominem attacks on Said and his band of alleged Pied Pipers also make it more difficult to sustain an attack on the role of Orientalists in authorizing certain aspects not only of American military and security policy but those of Israel as well.
Think of expert authorities like Gabriel Baer, who assured me, in the mids, that Egypt would never make peace with Israel. Bad Orientalism encourages the notion that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Bad Orientalism, paradoxically, though based on the concept of a certain Middle Eastern timelessness, authorizes ambitious schemes of political and social engineering based on short-term considerations while lacking any way of anticipating unexpected long-term consequences. The breathtaking insouciance of jejune publicists who speak in the name of foreign policy and who have no knowledge at all of the language real people actually speak, has fabricated an arid landscape ready for American power to construct there an ersatz model of free market "democracy".
But there is a difference between knowledge of other peoples and other times that is the result of understanding, compassion, careful study and analysis for their own sakes, and on the other hand knowledge that is part of an overall campaign of self-affirmation.
It is surely one of the intellectual catastrophes of history that an imperialist war confected by a small group of unelected US officials was waged against a devastated third world dictatorship on thoroughly ideological grounds having to do with world dominance, security control and scarce resources, but disguised for its true intent, hastened and reasoned for by orientalists who betrayed their calling as scholars. The major influences on George W Bush's Pentagon and National Security Council were men such as Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, experts on the Arab and Islamic world who helped the American hawks to think about such preposterous phenomena as the Arab mind and the centuries-old Islamic decline which only American power could reverse.
Today bookstores in the US are filled with shabby screeds bearing screaming headlines about Islam and terror, the Arab threat and the Muslim menace, all of them written by political polemicists pretending to knowledge imparted by experts who have supposedly penetrated to the heart of these strange oriental peoples.
CNN and Fox, plus myriad evangelical and rightwing radio hosts, innumerable tabloids and even middle-brow journals, have recycled the same unverifiable fictions and vast generalisations so as to stir up "America" against the foreign devil. Without a well-organised sense that the people over there were not like "us" and didn't appreciate "our" values - the very core of traditional orientalist dogma - there would have been no war. These people have now been joined in Iraq by a whole army of private contractors and eager entrepreneurs to whom shall be confided everything from the writing of textbooks and the constitution to the refashioning of Iraqi political life and its oil industry.
Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilise, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires. Twenty-five years after my book's publication, Orientalism once again raises the question of whether modern imperialism ever ended, or whether it has continued in the orient since Napoleon's entry into Egypt two centuries ago.
Arabs and Muslims have been told that victimology and dwelling on the depredations of empire are only ways of evading responsibility in the present. You have failed, you have gone wrong, says the modern orientalist. This of course is also VS Naipaul's contribution to literature, that the victims of empire wail on while their country goes to the dogs.
But what a shallow calculation of the imperial intrusion that is, how little it wishes to face the long succession of years through which empire continues to work its way in the lives say of Palestinians or Congolese or Algerians or Iraqis.
Think of the line that starts with Napoleon, continues with the rise of oriental studies and the takeover of North Africa, and goes on in similar undertakings in Vietnam, in Egypt, in Palestine and, during the entire 20th century, in the struggle over oil and strategic control in the Gulf, in Iraq, Syria, Palestine, and Afghanistan. Then think of the rise of anti-colonial nationalism, through the short period of liberal independence, the era of military coups, of insurgency, civil war, religious fanaticism, irrational struggle and uncompromising brutality against the latest bunch of "natives".
Each of these phases and eras produces its own distorted knowledge of the other, each its own reductive images, its own disputatious polemics. My idea in Orientalism was to use humanistic critique to open up the fields of struggle, to introduce a longer sequence of thought and analysis to replace the short bursts of polemical, thought-stopping fury that so imprison us.
I have called what I try to do "humanism", a word I continue to use stubbornly despite the scornful dismissal of the term by sophisticated postmodern critics. By humanism I mean first of all attempting to dissolve Blake's "mind-forg'd manacles" so as to be able to use one's mind historically and rationally for the purposes of reflective understanding. Moreover humanism is sustained by a sense of community with other interpreters and other societies and periods: strictly speaking therefore, there is no such thing as an isolated humanist.
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