Revisiting Orientalism

Assignment topic:  Revisiting Orientalism

Name:  Jinal B. Parmar

Roll no.: 11

M.A. Semester: 3

Paper no.: 11 Post-colonial literatures

Year: 2014 – 2015

PG Enrolment no: 13101025

Submitted to: Department of English

Smt. S. B. Gardi

Maharaja Krishnakumar sinhji Bhavnagar University

What is Orientalism?

                     Orientalism is a term which used by art historians and literary and cultural studies scholars for the imitation or depiction of the aspect of middle eastern and East Asian Cultures by writers, designer and artists from the west.  Orientalist derives from the Latin word for East — from the verb orior, “to rise” and referred to the orients, “the rising,” of the sun in that direction. Until the publication of Said’s work, the words orientalist and orientalism broadly described something similar to what we know now as “area studies.”

                  The term “Orientalism” is sometimes applied to the cultural imperialism it means that the control of the discourse, not only in ‘Orient’, but anywhere in the world. “Orientalism” is the study of Eastern people and their culture and society. In this term “Orientalism” refers to the orient or East and in the opposite to the “Occident” west. “Orient” means the people of Middle East and the “Occident” means the people of Europe.

                   Orientalism has defines in English that sometime Edward adopts the meaning, but he primarily used the word in two way like,

·         Any writing that makes an Orient/Occident distinction, including poetry and prose, philosophy, political theory. And economics, the memoirs of imperial admini­strators.

·         A mentality: "a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient," "a kind of Western projection onto and will to govern the Orient", or most simply, "the Western approach to the Orient." Edward Said

Orientalism Reconsidered

             The thesis of Orientalism is the existence of a "subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabs-Islamic peoples and their culture" which derives from the western culture and presented the wrong image of Asia, in general and Middle East, in particular. Orientalism had an impact on the fields of literary theory, cultural studies and human geography, and to a lesser extent on those of history and oriental studies.

               The book of “Orientalism” by Edward Said who uses the term “Orientalism” to define his view and his idea regarding the term Orientalism and he gives his idea about the Orientalism”. Said emphasizes most important in his book Orientalism to analyses the representation of culture, societies, histories, the relationship between power and knowledge, the role of the intellectual in his book. Edward Said said that,

“...the generic term that I have been employing to describe the Western
approach to the Orient; Orientalism is the discipline by which the
Orient was approached systematically, as a topic of
learning, discovery and practice”

                 Edward Said talks about the Western imperialism and the marginalization of the Eastern people. Then he talks about several overlapping domains,

1.     The changing of Historical and Cultural relationship between Europe and Asia, a relationship with a 4000 years old history

2.     The scientific discipline in the West according to which beginning in the early 19^th century one specialized in the study of various Oriental cultures and traditions

3.     The ideological suppositions, images, and fantasies about a currently important and politically urgent region of the world called the Orient

                  In these three aspect of Orientalism is the line separating Occident from Orient and Edward Said argued that it is less fact of nature than it is a fact of human production, which he has called imaginative geography.

“The two aspects of the Orient that set it off from the West in this pair of plays will remain essential motifs of European imaginative geography. A line is drawn between two continents. Europe is powerful and articulate; Asia is defeated and distant”

              These three aspects say that about the division between Orient and Occident is unchanging nor is it to say that it is simply fiction.

                 Orientalism affected the Middle Eastern studies transforming the way practitioners of the discipline examine and describe the Middle East.  The thesis of Orientalism is the existence of a "subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arab-Islamic peoples and their culture", which derives from Western culture's long tradition of false and romanticized images of Asia, in general, and the Middle East, in particular. Said goes back to the history of the term Orientalism and struggle against that it is a politically constructed binary, a category of interpretation rooted in preconceived and historically constituted ideas about the 'Orient' as an 'other'.

                  There are two set of problems which is the concerned with the problem of Orientalism reconsidered which are,

1.    first set of problem is from the stand point of local issues like who writes or studies the Orient, in what institutional or discursive setting, for what readers, and with what ends in mind

2.    the second set of problems is to a wider circle of issues

                These are the issues raised in the Orientalism. Which raised by methodology and then considerably sharpened by questions as to how the production of the knowledge best serves communal, as opposed to factional , ends, how knowledge that is non dominative and non coercive can be produced in a setting that is deeply inscribed with the politics, the consideration, the position and the strategies of power.

                   Reconsidered Orientalism is in this wider and libertarian optic entails nothing less than the creation of new kind of knowledge about the cultures and society. Edward Said said that he has been helped to achieve this broader understanding by nearly everyone who wrote about his Book and from who saw it for better or worse as being part of current debated, conflicts and contested interpretation in the Arab-Islamic world which interact with United States and Europe. Said goes back to his past where he was live in colonial Palestine and Egypt where he impulse to resist its accompanying was nurtured in the heady atmosphere of the post world war 2 period of independence.

                   In the Book of Orientalism Edward Said has created for breaking down disciplinary boundaries. The critics had been intra-disciplinary but Said  took the view that ‘Orientalism’ was an all encompassing meta narrative, finding evidence of it in ‘aesthetic and scholarly, sociological, economical, historical and philosophical texts. Orientalism is intrinsically tied to culture, in its multiple disciplinary forms. Said emphasizes in particular the high tide of Empire which gave the Orientalists the power to travel and articulate the thoughts of their subjects, creating a 'positional superiority' in which Western scholars 'always have the relative upper hand'. The word ‘Orient’ was shaped by the ‘desire, repressions, investments and projection of its scholar.

                  In Edward’s Orientalism which combines Foucault’s radical discourse theory with the theory of Hegemony by Gramsci.  In this Discourse theory Said found a very useful way to understand the homogeneity of Orientlist scholars trapped by the though diverse assumptions of Orientalism as a discourse.

                  In the Book of Edward Said’s Orientalism he proposed to the depiction of the ‘Orient’ as an ‘Other’ were essential to European understanding itself and constituted a powerful cultural form, and which Gramsci identified as Hegemony.

                    Said talks about the power and superiority of the westerns. Said's treatment of the 'Orient' as an imaginary textual construct allows him to avoid any analysis as to whether the knowledge produced bore any semblance to the real idea of  Middle East. The assumption would be that Orientalism has no ambit to be able to pass judgement on the veracity of Orientalist’s representations. He gives his own ideas about the idea of the Middle East.

One of the such Orientalist Hamilton Gibb who writes about the modern world on the people of Orient central feature of paradigmatic feature of the Orientalism that is,

                 "Islam, as a religion, has lost little of its force, but Islam as the arbiter of social life (in the modern world) is being dethroned; alongside it, or above it, new forces exert an authority... the ordinary Muslim citizen and cultivator had no political interests or functions, and no literature of easy access, except religious literature, had no festivals and communal life except in connection with religion. Saw little or nothing of the outside world except through religious glasses. To him, in consequence, religion meant everything."

                  According to his ideas ‘Islam’ is the key to everything in the Middle East which create the image of a very simple society and states that the politics, literature and the art which are derives from the Western countries and enters into the Islamic society. They detested to people in the region. And exploring sectarian differences or contested interpretations. 

Said in his Book ‘Orientalism does not presents the Oriental painting or other visual art in his survey, in spite of the example on the book’s cover but other writers, notably Linda Nochlin, have extended his analysis to cover it, "with uneven results" . Talal Asad, an anthropologists argued that the Orientalism “not only a catalogue of Western prejudices about and misrepresentations of Arabs and Muslims” he criticized the western culture.

 

Conclusion

                 In Orientalism the idea concluded that Western writing about the Orient depicts it as an irrational, weak, and feminized other, an existential condition contrasted with the rational, strong, and masculine West. This binary relation derives from the psychology of the western people to need to create a difference of cultural inequality between East and West. 

                  Said's critics argue that by making ethnicity and cultural background the test of authority and objectivity in studying the Orient, Said drew attention to the question of his own identity as a Palestinian and as a "Subaltern". He writes from his own experience as he was colonized by the Western society.