Unformatted text preview: OUT OF PLACE
In SAID’s whole life 1 Orientalism EDWARD SAID 1977
ORIENTALISM AS DISCOURSE
ORIENTALISM AS DISCIPLINE
* Main Themes of Orientalism
Exotic east
EAST IS EAST AND
WEST IS WEST
The Twins Shall Never Meet
White man’s
BURDEN/MISSION 2 Between the years 1979
through 1981 hundreds of
articles have been written
about Orientalism. In 2000, Eddie Yeghiayan, the Special
Collections Librarian of University of
California Irvine, compiled a list of
reviews on Orientalism. 32% of the essays were From Political Science and
Historical Journals. 32% were from Academic Journals. 25% from Newspaper articles. 10% from Literary Journals. 1% from other sources.
3 Orientalism was such a controversial
essay that it was able to impact many
different thought genres after the first
couple years of its publication. Orientalism exercises power and
has authority over the Orient Orientalism produces and manages
the Orient
4 The Orient was almost a European
invention, and had been since
antiquity a place of romance, exotic
beings, haunting memories and
landscapes, remarkable experiences. the main thing for the European visitor
was a European representation of
the Orient and its contemporary fate
5 the Other 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 vastly expanded American political
and economic role in the Near East (the
Middle East) makes great claims on our
understanding of that Orient.
6 the methodological
problems academic
imaginative meanings
historically and materially Foucault's notion of a discourse
because of Orientalism
the Orient was not (and is not) a free
subject of thought or action.
7 Orientalism derives from
… British and French cultural enter-pris … From the beginning of the nineteenth century until
the end of World War II France and Britain
dominated the Orient and Orientalism since World War II America has dominated the
Orient it always demonstrates the comparatively greater
strength of the Occident (British, French, or
American)
8 a different methodological
alternative the set of historical generalizations assumption
the Orient is not an inert fact of
nature 9 reasonable qualifications it would be wrong to conclude that the
Orient was essentially an idea, or a
creation with no corresponding reality. ideas, cultures, and histories cannot
seriously be understood or studied
without their force, or more precisely
their configurations of power One ought never to assume that the
structure of Orientalism is nothing more
than a structure of lies or of myths
10 Orientalism, is not an airy European fantasy about the Orient,
but a created body of theory and practice in which,
there has been a considerable material investment. The relationship between
Occident and Orient is
a relationship of
power, of domination, of varying degrees of a
complex hegemony
11 hegemony Gramsci hegemony
Prison Notebooks gives Orientalism the durability and the
strength that culture hegemonic both in and
outside Europe: the idea of European
identity as a superior one in comparison
with all the non-European peoples and
cultures.
12 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 "The Lustful Turk"
13 three aspects of
my contemporary reality 1. The distinction between pure
and political knowledge. 2. The methodological question. 3. The personal dimension.
14 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.
15 Orientalism,
designed to challenge the bias imbedded in the
Western consciousness The Orient was, for centuries,
based upon an intellectual
construct that reinforced
conditions of inequality 16 The most readily accepted
designation for Orientalism is an
academic one, and indeed the
label still serves in a number of
academic institutions. 17 the corporate institution for dealing with the
Orientdealing with it by making statements about it,
authorizing views of it,
describing it,
by teaching it,
settling it,
ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for
dominating, restructuring, and having
authority over the Orient.
18 above all
a discourse 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.
19 Orientalism realizing-- political imperialism
governs an entire field of study,
imagination, and scholarly institutions a dynamic exchange
between individual authors and the
large political concerns shaped by the
three great empires
20 principal methodological
devices for studying
authority 11 strategic location a way of describing the author's position
in a text with regard to the Oriental
material he writes about and strategic formation a way of analyzing the relationship
between texts and the way in which
groups of texts, types of texts, even
textual genres, acquire mass, density,
and referential power among themselves
and thereafter in the culture at large.
21 Everyone who writes
about the Orient must
locate himself vis-å-vis the
Orient Every writer on the Orient (and this
is true even of Homer) assumes
some Oriental precedent, some
previous knowledge of the Orient,
to which he refers and on which he
relies.
22 my concern with authority does not entail analysis of what lies
hidden in the Orientalist text, but
analysis rather of the text's surface,
its exteriority to what it de-scribes. Orientalism is premised upon
exteriority
23 Thus there was ( and is)
a linguistic Orient,
a Freudian Orient,
a Spenglerian Orient,
a Darwinian Orient,
a racist Orient
—and so on.
24 The unity of the large ensemble of
texts I analyze is due in part to the
fact that they frequently refer to
each other: Orientalism is after all a system for
citing works and authors.
25 several audiences in mind for students of literature and criticism for contemporary students of the Orient,
from university scholars to policymakers for readers in the so-called Third World My hope is to illustrate the formidable
structure of cultural domination and,
specifically for formerly colonized
peoples, the dangers and temptations of
employing this structure upon themselves
or upon others. 14
26 The personal dimension Much of the personal investment in this
study derives from my awareness of being
an "Oriental" as a child growing up in two
British colonies. In many ways my study of Orientalism
has been an attempt to inventory the
traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the
culture whose domination has been so
powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals. This is why for me the Islamic Orient has
had to be the center of attention.
27 ...
View
Full Document
