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ORIENTALISM Orientalism refers to two intellectual trends in the West: the appearance or deliberate cultivation in literature and art of stylistic and
aesthetic traits reminiscent of Asian cultures, which
began in eighteenth-century Europe; and, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the scholarly study of
premodern Asia, especially philology (the study of language and linguistics) and other text-based pursuits,
by Europeans and Americans. The fields of anthropology, sociology, and cultural, political, and economic history, insofar as they address Asia, have since
been called Orientalist as well.
The First Orientalists
The earliest Orientalists, mostly trained in the
Greco-Roman classics, were interested in recovering
ancient texts, often seeing this as a way to open a window onto the origins of culture, which was itself a ma-
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Said argued that Western scholars systematically misunderstood and misrepresented these societies, due
largely to the nature of their relationship to them (one
of cultural superiority and imperial dominance). His
conclusions have subsequently been extended to apply
to Western scholarship on Asia in general. At the same
time, his study extended its purview beyond scholarly
works to include journalism, travel writing, and other
types of literature, so that "Orientalism" as he defined
it is in fact the sum of all Western literary and artistic expressions relating to Asia.
Said traced the roots of modern Orientalism back
to ancient Greek depictions of the East and outlined
its later development by littrateurs (Dante Alighieri,
12651321; Geoffrey Chaucer, 13421400; William
Shakespeare, 15641616). According to him, the Orientalist vision of the East was well established as a literary trope long before the colonialist period; he
claimed in fact that "colonial rule was justified in advance by Orientalism, rather than after the fact" (Said
1978: 39).
Beginning with the Egyptian expedition of
Napoleon Bonaparte (17691821), "the Orientalists
special expertise was put directly to functional colonial
use" (Said 1978: 80). For Said, the work of Sir William
Jones exemplifies the double task of Orientalism: to describe, tabulate, analyze, and codify the Orient "scientifically," always in comparison with the Occident; and
to use the knowledge thus generated to master and rule
the Orientals. Thus Jones attempted to codify and apply in the courts a traditional Hindu law based on Sanskrit texts, as part of the East India Companys policy
of governing Indians by their own codes.
Said argued that, although Orientalism adopts the
posture of an objective scientific pursuit, it has from
the first been motivated and sustained by a political
purpose: the governance of colonial territories. Imperial administrators like Lord Curzon (18591925),
viceroy of India, acknowledged that knowledge of the
culture and sensibilities of the people of the East were
indispensable for securing colonial dominance. With
the end of the European empires and a decline in the
popularity of philology, Said argued, the Orientalist
enterprise increasingly took a new form: area-studies
fields, which created expertise to be made available to
governments and policy-making institutions.
Said argued that Orientalism helped the West to
construct an image of itself by projecting every trait
opposite to that of the Wests onto the screen of a
backward and decadent Orient. He made this argument by psychologizing the Wests relationship to the
East as self to "other." The Oriental was reduced to a
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stereotype, springing from the notion that it is possible to define the essential nature of Arabs or Muslims.
Orientals, he claimed, are routinely characterized as
sensuous, childlike, irrational, mendacious, and culturally passive and static. Such traits are supposedly
exemplified in the person of the "Oriental despot,"
whose state is said to be the characteristic political institution of the East. Defining the Orient in this way
provided a rationale for Western imperialism and
colonialism: the destiny of Western power is to introduce reason and order into the Orient.
Saids critique of Orientalism became one of the
most important foundations for what has been called
colonial-discourse theory or, more broadly, postcolonial studies (the study of the relationships between European nations and the societies they formerly
colonized). Another notable ramification of this field
is subaltern studies, an approach to Indian history led
by the Indian historian Ranajit Guha (b. 1923) and inspired by the work of Gramsci, which aims to write
the history of subaltern peoples by recovering their
own voices and agency. These approaches share a
recognition that knowledge is intertwined with the exercise of power, as well as a postmodernist skepticism
of all claims to objectivity.
Criticisms
Although widely praised in literary critical circles
from the start, Saids book has been criticized from a
variety of angles. First, representatives of Asian studies in a wide range of disciplines sharply objected to
the suggestion that they were willfully or unwittingly
complicit in their governments programs for colonization and for political and economic domination,
even in the postcolonial era. Philologists, for example,
insisted that their painstaking analyses of ancient texts
were only distantly related to any political agenda.
Many objected to the suggestion that the field as a
whole displays cynicism and bad faith. It has been observed that Said essentialized the Orientalist and elided
all differences of approach or discipline. He made little distinction between eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury views of the East and those of his scholarly
contemporaries.
Furthermore, it can be pointed out that the charges
laid at the door of Orientalists and of Westerners in
general apply also to Asians and to people everywhere.
Jones, for instance, is faulted for "an irresistible impulse always to codify, to subdue the infinite variety
of the Orient to a complete digest" (Said 1978: 78),
but the Sanskrit legal works he consulted were deliberate codifications already, designed by Brahman
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scholars to consolidate and extend their own authority. Saids fallacy, by this reasoning, is to demonize Europeans in particular for behaving as the privileged and
powerful do everywhere; indeed, the colonized of
modern times were often the colonizers of earlier eras
and produced "Orientalisms" of their own. Moreover,
many critics note that scholarship on Asia is no longer
in the hands of Westerners alone, and that the academic climate has changed considerably, partly in response to the arguments of Said.
On the other hand, criticisms also emerged from
the vanguard of literary, social, and political theorists.
Notable among these are Dennis Porter (b. 1933) and
Aijaz Ahmad (b. 1945). Porter, a literary critic interested in travel writing, found Saids literary analysis
too blunt: his sources (said Porter) are inadequately
historicized, and literary texts are not treated any differently than are obviously ideological texts. Porter
pointed to the fact that aesthetic products follow more
than simply ideological imperatives. At the heart of
this problem, Porter saw an incompatibility between
Foucaults discourse theory and Gramscis understanding of hegemony.
Aijaz Ahmad, an Indian Marxist critic, objected to
Saids acceptance of the Nietzschean tenet that all
communication is distorting and all truths illusory, an
article of faith in late-twentieth-century French cultural criticism. This claim, which Ahmad called irrational and antihuman, allowed Said to dispense with
considerations of class, gender, and even historical
process. Ahmad also noted the totalizing character of
Saids Orientalism. All other forms of oppression are
subordinated to Orientalism, and all Westerners and
everything they have said and done are by definition
Orientalist. Ahmad alleged that this formulation of oppression was particularly well received in the United
States by mostly male Third World immigrant scholars of upper-class background who were not moved by
theories of class-based and gender-based oppression,
and who could represent themselves as oppressed despite the fact that people of their social class often benefited from the colonial order.
Timothy Lubin
Further Reading
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. (1989) The
Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial
Literatures. London: Routledge.
Said, Edward. (1978) Orientalism. London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul.
Williams, Patrick, and Laura Chrisman, eds. (1994) Colonial
Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. New York:
Columbia University Press.
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