Orientalism - Reading - Orientalism(1978 SA-6 No other book...

Orientalism
(1978)
SA
-6
No other book of Edward Said's has enjoyed the attention of Orientalism. Since
its publication in the United States in 1978, it has been translated into more than
twenty-five languages with still more translations in progress. It has been the
subject of countless conferences and Impassioned debates. Per haps more than
any work of late twentieth-century criticism, it has transformed the study of
literature and culture,
Yet for all of its success, Orientalism initially had difficulty finding a major
publisher. Some publishing houses did not consider the book's idea
groundbreak. ing; still others were unwilling to back a book whose policies were
at odds with the mainstream's view of Palestinians, Arabs, and Israel. Of the few
publishers that expressed an early interest in it, the University of California Press
offered Said a paltry $250 advance for the book. Eventually, however, Pantheon,
renowned for publishing the works of radical critics like Noam Chomsky and
Michel Foucault, sent Orientalism to press in late 1977.
Orientalism's Impact surprised both publishers and even Sald himself. For the
topic of OrientalismEurope's representations of the East-was not totally now;
other scholars had addressed the subject before, In 1953 Raymond Schwab wrote
Le Renaissance orientale (a fastidiously detailed study of Europe's nineteenth-
century experience of the Orient); a decade later, Anwar Abdel Malek wrote an
influential article
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Urientalism
"Orientallsm in Crisis" (a Marxist interpretation of Europe's representation
of the "East"). In 1969 V. G. Kiernan wrote The Lords of the Human Kind (a
history of European colonization);
But Orientalism differed markedly from its predecessors. It brought together the
philosophies of Michel Foucault and Antonio Gramsci to challenge the authority
of Western knowledge of--and power over-the Orient. It examined an array of
nineteenthcentury French and British novelists, poets, politicians, philologists,
historians, travelers, and imperial administrators: the voyages and travel
narratives of nineteenth-century French authors such as Chateaubriand,
Lamartine, Nerval, and Flaubert; the Indian journalism of Karl Marx; the writings
of the first modern Orientalist Sylvestre de Sacy and of the French nineteenth-
century philologist Ernest Renan; the adventure cales of Richard Burton and T. E.
Lawrence; the speeches of Alfred Balfour; and the cables of British colonial
governors in Egypt like Lord Cromer.
Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, Said viewed this ensemble of writing
on the Orient as a discourse. Together the writings of Renan, Flaubert, T. E.
Lawrence, and others composed a discipline by which European culture
managed and produced the "Orient." Their writings expressed "a will... not only to
understand what (was) non-European, but also to control and manipulate what
was manifestly differ
passed off as conventional wisdom or common sense. Hegemony, Said
explained, was how Orientalism could remain an indefatigable cultural and