UNIVERSITY SIDIMOHAMED BEN ABDELLAH, FEZ

FACULTY OF LETTERS AND HUMAN SCIENCES, DHAR LMEHRAZ

POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES
Semester: 6 Group: C Pr. GHOURDOU
Orientalism (Edward W. Said)
ON A VISIT to Beirut during the terrible civil war of 1975–1976 a French journalist wrote regretfully of the gutted
downtown area that ‘it had once seemed to belong to…the Orient of Chateaubriand and Nerval’ (Desjardins 1976:14). He
was right about the place, of course, especially so far as a European was concerned. The Orient was almost a European
invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable
experiences. Now it was disappearing; in a sense it had happened, its time was over. Perhaps it seemed irrelevant that
Orientals themselves had something at stake in the process, that even in the time of Chateaubriand and Nerval Orientals had
lived there, and that now it was they who were suffering; the main thing for the European visitor was a European
representation of the Orient and its contemporary fate, both of which had a privileged communal significance for the
journalist and his French readers….
The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the
source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the
Other. In addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality,
experience. Yet none of this Orient is merely imaginative. The Orient is an integral part of European material civilization
and culture. 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 and colonial styles. In
contrast, the American understanding of the Orient will seem considerably less dense, although our recent Japanese,
Korean, and Indochinese adventures ought now to be creating a more sober, more realistic ‘Oriental’ awareness. Moreover,
the vastly expanded American political and economic role in the Near East (the Middle East) makes great claims on our
understanding of that Orient.
It will be clear to the reader…that by Orientalism I mean several things, all of them, in my opinion, interdependent.
The most readily accepted designation for Orientalism is an academic one, and indeed the label still serves in a number of
academic institutions. Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient—and this applies whether the person is
an anthropologist, sociologist, historian, or philologist—either in its specific or its general aspects, is an Orientalist, and
what he or she does is Orientalism…
Related to this academic tradition, whose fortunes, transmigrations, specializations, and transmissions are in part the
subject of this study, is a more general meaning for Orientalism. Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological
and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident.’ Thus a very large mass of
writers, among whom are poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators, have
accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social
descriptions, and political accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, ‘mind,’ destiny, and so on. This Orientalism
can accommodate Aeschylus, say, and Victor Hugo, Dante and Karl Marx. A little later in this introduction I shall deal with
the methodological problems one encounters in so broadly construed a ‘field’ as this.
The interchange between the academic and the more or less imaginative meanings of Orientalism is a constant one,
and since the late eighteenth century there has been a considerable, quite disciplined—perhaps even regulated—traffic
between the two. Here I come to the third meaning of Orientalism, which is something more historically and materially
defined than either of the other two. Taking the late eighteenth century as a very roughly defined starting point Orientalism
can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making
statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style
for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient. I have found it useful here to employ Michel Foucault’s
notion of a discourse, as described by him in The Archaeology of Knowledge and in Discipline and Punish, to identify
Orientalism. My contention is that without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the
enormously 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.
Moreover, so authoritative a position did Orientalism have that I believe no one writing, thinking, or acting on the
Orient could do so without taking account of the limitations on thought and action imposed by Orientalism. In brief,
because of Orientalism the Orient was not (and is not) a free subject of thought or action. This is not to say that Orientalism
unilaterally determines what can be said about the Orient, but that it is the whole network of interests inevitably brought to
bear on (and therefore always involved in) any occasion when that peculiar entity ‘the Orient’ is in question. How this
happens is what this book tries to demonstrate. It also tries to show that European culture gained in strength and identity by
setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self….
I have begun with the assumption that the Orient is not an inert fact of nature. It is not merely there, just as the
Occident itself is not just there either. We must take seriously Vico’s great observation that men make their own history,
that what they can know is what they have made, and extend it to geography: as both geographical and cultural entities—to
say nothing of historical entities—such locales, regions, geographical sectors as ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’ are man-made.
Therefore as much as the West itself, the Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and
vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West. The two geographical entities thus support and to an
extent reflect each other.
Having said that, one must go on to state a number of reasonable qualifications. In the first place, it would be wrong
to conclude that the Orient was essentially an idea, or a creation with no corresponding reality…. There were—and are—
cultures and nations whose location is in the East, and their lives, histories, and customs have a brute reality obviously
greater than anything that could be said about them in the West. About that fact this study of Orientalism has very little to
contribute, except to acknowledge it tacitly. But the phenomenon of Orientalism as I study it here deals principally, not
with a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the internal consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about
the Orient (the East as career) despite or beyond any correspondence, or lack thereof, with a ‘real’ Orient….
A second qualification is that ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be understood or studied without their
force, or more precisely their configurations of power, also being studied. To believe that the Orient was created — or, as I
call it, ‘Orientalized’— and to believe that such things happen simply as a necessity of the imagination, is to be
disingenuous. The relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees
of a complex hegemony….
This brings us to a third qualification. One ought never to assume that the structure of Orientalism is nothing more
than a structure of lies or of myths which, were the truth about them to be told, would simply blow away. I myself believe
that Orientalism is more particularly valuable as a sign of European-Atlantic power over the Orient than it is a veridic
discourse about the Orient (which is what, in its academic or scholarly form, it claims to be)….
In a quite constant way, Orientalism depends for its strategy on this flexible positional superiority, which puts the
Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand. And
why should it have been otherwise, especially during the period of extraordinary European ascendancy from the late
Renaissance to the present? The scientist, the scholar, the missionary, the trader, or the soldier was in, or thought about, the
Orient because he could be there, or could think about it, with very little resistance on the Orient’s part. Under the general
heading of knowledge of the Orient, and within the umbrella of Western hegemony over the Orient during the period from
the end of the eighteenth century, there emerged a complex Orient suitable for study in the academy, for display in the
museum, for reconstruction in the colonial office, for theoretical illustration in anthropological, biological, linguistic, racial,
and historical theses about mankind and the universe, for instances of economic and sociological theories of development,
revolution, cultural personality, national or religious character.
Additionally, the imaginative examination of things Oriental was based more or less exclusively upon a sovereign
Western consciousness out of whose unchallenged centrality an Oriental world emerged, first according to general ideas
about who or what was an Oriental, then according to a detailed logic governed not simply by empirical reality but by a
battery of desires, repressions, investments, and projections….
Therefore, 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, historical, and philological texts; it is an
elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident)
but also of a whole series of ‘interests’ which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction,
psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than
expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a
manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct,
corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with
various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political (as with a colonial or imperial
establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning sciences like comparative linguistics or anatomy, or any of the modern
policy sciences), power cultural (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values), power moral (as with ideas about
what ‘we’ do and what ‘they’ cannot do or understand as ‘we’ do). Indeed, my real argument is that Orientalism is—and
does not simply represent—a considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, and as such has less to do
with the Orient than it does with ‘our’ world.
Because Orientalism is a cultural and a political fact, then, it does not exist in some archival vacuum; quite the
contrary, I think it can be shown that what is thought, said, or even done about the Orient follows (perhaps occurs within)
certain distinct and intellectually knowable lines. Here too a considerable degree of nuance and elaboration can be seen
working as between the broad superstructural pressures and the details of composition, the facts of textuality. Most
humanistic scholars are, I think, perfectly happy with the notion that texts exist in contexts, that there is such a thing as
intertextuality, that the pressures of conventions, predecessors, and rhetorical styles limit what Walter Benjamin once called
the ‘overtaxing of the productive person in the name of…the principle of “creativity”,’ in which the poet is believed on his
own, and out of his pure mind, to have brought forth his work (Benjamin 1973:71). Yet there is a reluctance to allow that
political, institutional, and ideological constraints act in the same manner on the individual author.