Introduction Orientalism by Edward W. Said Review by: Robert A. Kapp The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 39, No.

3 (May, 1980), pp. 481-484 Published by: Association for Asian Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2054675 . Accessed: 12/05/2013 08:21
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VOL.

XXXIX, No. 3

JOURNAL

OF ASIAN STUDIES

MAY I980

Review Symposium: Edward Said's Orientalism

Introduction
ROBERTA. KAPP* Introducing these three critical essays on Edward Said's Orientalismtraises perplexing questions of scholarly and professional definition. In the case of the recent JAS symposium on Thomas A. Metzger's Escape from Predicament, the organizer of the group effort came to the Journal with a proposal which the editor ultimately encouraged, accepted, and brought to pu4blication; this time the editor initiated the Said symposium himself, persuaded his colleagues to participate, and then subjected them to varying degrees of editorial suggestion before sending the whole package off to the printer. It might well be suggested that editors should stick to processing and avoid initiating; that there is a built-in conflict of interest, a potential for abuse of editorial discretion, if the editor not only decides what ought to be accepted for publication but also dabbles in what ought to be written about in the first place. As is obvious from this symposium's appearance in the Journal, I would hold that occasionally crossing the line from processing to initiating-in the case of a work like Said's, for example, which does not fall within the ordinary domain of the Journal's primary readership-can be constructive. The three essays which follow convey most of Orientalism's central arguments in the process of critically discussing Said and his book, so we need not elaborate those here at great length. At the same time, the symposium does not assume that its readers have already consumed the book and formed their opinions on it. I therefore wish to deal here with two other matters: the nature of Orientalism's significance, and in this journal. the reasons for developing such extensive treatment of Orientalism Orientalismis important because it addresses issues which are (or ought to be) central to the self-conception of scholars who are professionally socialized in and work in one culture but who devote themselves to the study of another culture (e.g., Asianists professionally rooted in Western societies). Said writes about what he calls (borrowing from Michel Foucault) the "discourse" of nineteenth and twentieth century Anglo-French Orientalism as it confronted the Islamic Near East. Said's notion of discourse is broad; he analyzes the assumptions, rooted in religious conviction and conflict, from which nineteenth century Orientalist conceptions of Islamic societies emerged; the interrelationships among Orientalist tourism, Orientalist philological classicism, Orientalist apologias for colonial domination, and what he considers the latter-day Orientalist table scraps-social science-based "area studies" and the pattern of American domination they support. As he analyzes the structure and content of the Orientalist discourse, Said builds his case with literary evidence (he has been faulted elsewhere for failing to distinguish the literary fan* Robert A. Kapp taught Chinese history at Rice University and the University of Washington, and edits TheJournal of Asian Studies.

t Orientalism.By Edward W. Said. New York: Pantheon Books, I978. xiii, 368 pp. Notes, Index. $ I 5. 00 (cloth); $4.95 (paper).

48I

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482

ROBERT A. KAPP

tasies of French novelists from the scholarly contributions of learned Orientalist scholar-sleuths). Said is especially sensitive to the language in which the Orientalist discourse is at once framed and expressed-the language which, constituting the discourse, creates the discursive object. Said dwells on the ways in which putative knowledge about the "Orient" in fact grows within a complex milieu of institutions, social and religious customs, and the exercise of power: the institutionallife of a scholarlyfield, the collective The work of predecessors, nature of any learned enterprise:these, to say nothing of economic and social production. circumstances,tend to diminish the effectsof the individualscholar's A field like Orientalism has a cumulative and corporateidentity, one that is learning(the classics,the with traditional stronggiven its associations particularly Bible, philology), public institutions (governments, trading companies, geowriting (travelbooks, andgenericallydetermined graphicalsocieties, universities) books of exploration,fantasy,exotic description).The result for Orientalismhas certainthings, certaintypesof statement,certaintypesof been a sort of consensus; work have seemed for the Orientalist correct. . . . The Orient is taught, reupon in certaindiscreteways.(p. 202) andpronounced searched,administered, The persisting reality of Western predominance over the Islamic Orient in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Said maintains, was a vital factor in the formation and refinement of Orientalist assumptions, subject matter, language, and conclusions. (The point is obliquely challenged by Professor Minear in his essay here.) Said also argues that as the artifacts of Orientalist thought piled up, the Orientalist landscape was itself transformed; the discourse took on a life of its own. Where Egypt to their own country's Islam, had represented at first Orientalists had represented readers (a form of aggression and expropriation itself, in his view), the accumulation the Orient-constituted, as of Orientalist lore reached a point where the lore created it were, an Orientalist Orient that in turn became the object of the most tangible kinds of political, military, and cultural assault from the Orientalist West. Thus Said's work cannot simply be considered literary criticism, or historiography. What he aims to unearth is the matrix within which ideas, vocabularies, and structures of power are woven together. To my mind, his very specific points-about Western stereotypes of the Near East (passivity, sexual allure, racial inferiority, and so forth), and about contemporary political conflicts between the U.S.-dominated West and the no longer quiescent Islamic peoples of the Near East-are frosting on his cake. The essential issue he grapples with-and for which he ought to be read, whether all of his arguments succeed or not-is the problem of what might be called the affiliations of knowledge: how can one "know" about something which is the figment of a socially, culturally, and in the end linguistically formed imagination? of anything, ... the realissue is whetherindeedtherecan be a true representation or whether any and all representations,because they are representations,are embeddedfirstin the languageand then in the culture, institutions,and political is the correctone . . . then we If the latteralternative ambienceof the representer. is eo ipso implicated, must be preparedto accept the fact that a representation intertwined, embedded, interwovenwith a great many other things besides the (p. 272) "truth,"which is itself a representation.

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INTRODUCTION

483

To be sure, Said is not the first writer to confront these issues; he acknowledges his own debt to Foucault on these central points, and studies in the sociology of knowledge such as Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality (Garden City: Doubleday, I966) explore the question of socially validated knowledge at length. What Said gives us, however, is a detailed, even textual reconstruction of the development of a broad and comprehensive field of discourseone of particular relevance to Asianists in the West today. Let me close with a concrete example of the issue which gives Said his significance. An American scholar of twentieth century Chinese history learns to his surprise that his slim published monograph, drawn from his doctoral dissertation, is to be translated into Chinese and published in China. An unusual development (less rare in the case of Japan, of course, but Japan has a very different relationship with the United States): the foreigner's written work-the product of absolutely no personal experience in the part of China with which it deals, the result of his first half-dozen years' labor with the Chinese language and a few years' exposure to library holdings and archives-is rendered into the language of its own documents and offered to readers in precisely that region of China on which its research had focused. Is it not essential to recognize that this study, the culminating artifact of a highly formalized and structured process of academic training and identity certification in the community of American academics, is simply not the same thing when it is put into Chinese and offered to the participants in the various modes of discourse that prevail there? That, put in specific concrete circumstances, is Said's question. Can it be that the thing-the study, the book, the physical object which expresses the labor and thinking of the author- really does stand alone and self-defined, in any language, for any reader, for every culture, against every historical backdrop?I doubt it, and would argue that the American scholar in the above case should seek to publish an informing preface to the Chinese edition: "This is how the book came to be; this is how the topic came to be chosen; this is what went into the researchand training; this is what completion of the study seemed to mean, in professional and even financial terms, to the author," and so forth. The point is the same for cross-cultural scholarly endeavor in general; why should the self-recognition and sensitivity to the complex contexts of knowledge which are so clearly necessary in the case of the translated monograph be any less necessarywhen scholarsare communicating within their own world of discourse? This, it seems to me, is what Said means when he writes of helping scholars to understand their own genealogy. Now, in the final analysis, even an ardent proponent of Said's critical approach would do well to decide where it must all end. How far can one go in pursuit of the ineffable relationships of object and word, historical document and the reality of the past? An optimistic attempt, one early September day, to engage a fresh class of undergraduates on the subject (the chain of corruption leading from the past, through the formation of contemporary documents, then latter-day research and writing, synthesizing of research into textbooks, and finally the ultimate manipulation-the professorial lecture), left nearly everyone asleep within minutes. One can, perhaps, only go on protesting against the tyranny of the document or of language itself for so long; then one either has to reach some sort of agreement with oneself and get on with the scholarly work at hand (and, inseparably, with the professionally-ordained life to be lived), or else one must face up to the fact of ultimate inexpressibility and depart from the scene of the struggle-into silence or

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484

ROBERT

A.

KAPP

into some other walk of life. In this sense, for all his railing and his bitterness, his repetitiousness and tendentiousness-indeed, notwithstanding his failure to tell his readers what oughtto havebeenin the place of the Orientalist vision of reality that was and still is-Said is the optimist. Lacking that optimism, Orientalism might not be worth serious pursuit; possessing it, it deserves careful thought.

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