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    Orientalism: Q-2: The Latest Phase of Orientalism

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    - Edward Said argues that Orientalism helped justify Western imperialism by portraying the Orient as inferior and irrational. He analyzes the views of two early Orientalists, Arthur Balfour and Lord Cromer, who argued the West was qualified to rule the East based on their knowledge and power. - Said shows how these scholars constructed an "us vs. them" dichotomy and removed the Orient's power to represent itself. He argues Orientalism was not just an academic field but helped provide the framework for Western domination over Eastern societies from the 18th-19th centuries. - By closely examining texts, Said demonstrates how Orientalism developed certain stereotypes and perceptions of the East that persisted for centuries and helped

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    Orientalism: Q-2: The Latest Phase of Orientalism

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    sala uddin
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    - Edward Said argues that Orientalism helped justify Western imperialism by portraying the Orient as inferior and irrational. He analyzes the views of two early Orientalists, Arthur Balfour and Lord Cromer, who argued the West was qualified to rule the East based on their knowledge and power. - Said shows how these scholars constructed an "us vs. them" dichotomy and removed the Orient's power to represent itself. He argues Orientalism was not just an academic field but helped provide the framework for Western domination over Eastern societies from the 18th-19th centuries. - By closely examining texts, Said demonstrates how Orientalism developed certain stereotypes and perceptions of the East that persisted for centuries and helped

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    - Edward Said argues that Orientalism helped justify Western imperialism by portraying the Orient as inferior and irrational. He analyzes the views of two early Orientalists, Arthur Balfour and Lord Cromer, who argued the West was qualified to rule the East based on their knowledge and power. - Said shows how these scholars constructed an "us vs. them" dichotomy and removed the Orient's power to represent itself. He argues Orientalism was not just an academic field but helped provide the framework for Western domination over Eastern societies from the 18th-19th centuries. - By closely examining texts, Said demonstrates how Orientalism developed certain stereotypes and perceptions of the East that persisted for centuries and helped

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    312 views5 pages

    Orientalism: Q-2: The Latest Phase of Orientalism

    Uploaded by

    sala uddin
    - Edward Said argues that Orientalism helped justify Western imperialism by portraying the Orient as inferior and irrational. He analyzes the views of two early Orientalists, Arthur Balfour and Lord Cromer, who argued the West was qualified to rule the East based on their knowledge and power. - Said shows how these scholars constructed an "us vs. them" dichotomy and removed the Orient's power to represent itself. He argues Orientalism was not just an academic field but helped provide the framework for Western domination over Eastern societies from the 18th-19th centuries. - By closely examining texts, Said demonstrates how Orientalism developed certain stereotypes and perceptions of the East that persisted for centuries and helped

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    Q-2: The latest phase of orientalism

    Ans: Orientalism is a 1978 book by Edward W. Said, in which the author


    establishes the eponymous term "Orientalism" as a critical concept to
    describe the West's commonly contemptuous depiction and portrayal of
    "The East," i.e. the Orient. Societies and peoples of the Orient are those who
    inhabit the places of Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East. Said argues
    that Orientalism, in the sense of the Western scholarship about the Eastern
    World, is inextricably tied to the imperialist societies who produced it,
    which makes much Orientalist work inherently political and servile
    to power.

    In 1910 Arthur James Balfour addressed his qualifications for being "superior with
    regard to people you choose to call Oriental." He argued he was able to speak
    regarding the Orient based on his knowledge of the Orient civilization.

    Another well-known Orientalist was Lord Cromer, England's representative in


    Egypt between 1883 and 1907. Rather than speaking about the Orient as an
    abstract, Cromer spoke more specifically about his experiences in India and Egypt,
    emphasizing that both knowledge and power made the management of these
    countries easy. Said argues that these aspects of Orientalism did not serve to
    justify colonialism after the fact but rather provided the premise for colonial rule
    at the outset. The initial creation of a framework of domination during the 18th
    and 19th centuries allowed for domination to occur. This framework was initially
    characterized as an "us" versus "them" dichotomy, established by those who
    were in power, and thus in a position to act as knowledge producers. Said states
    that this is the basis of the "main intellectual issue raised by Orientalism." In those
    cases where an "us" versus "them" dichotomy arises, is it possible to avoid the
    "hostility expressed by the division"? Said argues that to understand how the
    framework of Orientalism arose, it is necessary to understand the historical
    context under which it was generated. At its core, Orientalism represented a
    system of "knowledge" and perceived "power" regarding the Orient that framed
    interactions with the West. Said concludes the chapter by setting up the historical
    timeline for the development of Orientalism through the 18th–20th centuries he
    goes on to describe in later parts.

    Said sets up his argument against Orientalism by focusing on the views of two
    early Orientalists, Arthur James Balfour and Lord Cromer. By beginning the text
    with specific definitions of Orientalism, Said sets the tone for the rest of the text.
    Rather than focus on flushing out a purely theoretical argument, he uses specific,
    textual examples to support his ideas. While previous scholarly works had
    broached similar ideas regarding Orientalism, the strength of Said's text—and
    why it continues to be considered one of the seminal anthropological works—is
    the level of detail he provides across a wide span of history. In order to do this,
    Said provides sections of Balfour and Cromer's speeches, breaking down their
    arguments sentence-by-sentence and word-by-word. From the outset, he
    provides historical evidence for the use of the terms Orient and Orientalism
    within literature.

    Thus, Said is able to make the argument that these terms have a historical basis
    found in literature. This is a fundamental concept for his argument that
    Orientalism was formed from previously conceived definitions and
    understandings. These archaic understandings of a complex group of people,
    clumped under the term Orient, were continuously used for centuries and up to
    the present day. Said claims their basis is in original, literary texts such as
    "Chaucer and Mandeville ... Shakespeare, Dryden, Pope, and Byron."

    Furthermore, by breaking down the individual arguments of Balfour and Cromer,


    Said is able to evaluate their tone and perspective to illustrate how they create an
    "us" versus "them" dichotomy, how the Orient is dehumanized, and how the
    natives' power to speak is removed. Using both Balfour and Cromer, Said is able
    to show that, in the case of two different Orientalists—one removed from the
    Orient and the other directly involved in the everyday management of the Orient
    —the framework for talking about the Orient remained the same. Thus,
    Orientalism was not confined to a specific group of people, but was a pervasive
    paradigm.

    This is fundamental to Said's argument. From the outset, the understanding of the
    Orient was derived not from the people, but rather a perception about the people
    of the Orient based on cultural attributes. This understanding is inherently flawed,
    especially from the postcolonial standpoint Said is taking here. The voice of the
    Orient was being created by, and spoken through, the words of the West. Said
    draws on literary texts, specifically two plays, The Persians and The Bacchae, to
    illustrate this point. He analyzes how East and West are depicted, respectively,
    describing the literary devices used to do so, such as the "motif of the Orient as
    insinuating danger." Thus, the West was concerned mainly with an unknown or
    potentially threatening culture. Here, Said is using literary analysis to describe
    exactly how the Orient is being framed, drawing on Dante's Divine Comedy and
    other texts to detail how a physical, cultural geography is created through words.
    He later extended this line of analysis to contemporary media studies in Covering
    Islam.
    Thus, everything that was good about the Orient was framed as the product of a
    European connection. The book emphasized the heroic nature of Napoleon and
    the greatness of the project he was undertaking in a nation that had fallen into
    barbarism. The pervading idea at the time was that once Egypt was restored to its
    former glory, other Oriental nations would fall in line. Said argues that Napoleon's
    journey marked the point at which the language used to discuss the Orient shifted
    from descriptive to "a means of creation." He claims this shift can clearly be seen
    in the conception of the Suez Canal by Ferdinand de Lesseps. The enormous
    amount of money and effort required to build the canal was justified by the
    benefits de Lesseps argued would be passed on to people who "could never have
    done for themselves."
    Moving on from the literary tradition of Orientalism, Said discusses the first texts
    to arise out of European and Eastern contact as the first Orientalist texts. Despite
    "going beyond the comparative shelter of the Biblical Orient," these initial works
    detailing contact with individuals were written in a way to reinforce the Oriental
    "myth." For instance, Said notes how Simon Ockley's History of the Saracens
    focuses on describing Islam as "heresy." Said posits that prior to contact with the
    Orient, there was very little to be done to prepare except to read the early literary
    works. This reinforced the view surrounding the Orient and did nothing to dispel
    the "threat" of Islam.

    Thus, when later contact with the Orient occurred—such as Napoleon's


    expedition to Egypt as detailed in Description de l'Égypte—the West began to
    assert its power over the East. In order to serve his goal of domination over the
    East, Napoleon categorized it, defining it in connection to the "distant European
    past," thus making it inherently subservient to the West with himself as the hero.
    Said says this served to decrease the threat of Islam.

    Said also claims the major change resulting from Napoleon's expedition was that
    it "destroyed the Orient's distance," symbolized by the creation of the Suez Canal,
    which was completed in 1869. The Orient was no longer the "other," but was a
    physical location the West now had power over. Equally, the Orient had become a
    product of Orientalism based on the literature of the period. The problem with
    this characterization, as Said argues in future chapters, is that the basis of
    knowledge remained the same despite changing relations with the Orient. Said
    uses this chapter to set the premise for how Orientalism changed throughout
    history.
    Said emphasizes that while the "official intellectual genealogy of Orientalism"
    would fail to include travel literature, these works were fundamentally important
    to the understanding of how Orientalism was constructed. The dichotomy
    between East and West has served to lump the entire Orient into one category
    that fails to acknowledge the legitimate distinctions between groups. Equally, the
    same characterizations of the Orient that Orientalists originally developed are still
    in play because of a commitment to this "textual attitude." Said provides a
    portion of a lecture given by H.A.R. Gibb in 1945 at the University of Chicago, and
    another lecture given in 1963 at Harvard University, in which he uses the same
    discriminatory language used to characterize the Orient. Said's aim is to describe
    the pervasiveness of these text-based paradigms over time.
    Orientalism has persisted in a form relatively unchanged since its initial
    conception. Said is able to break down the components of Orientalism, using
    techniques drawn from his background in literary comparison because the basis
    of Orientalism is not only inherently textual in nature but also sustained through
    text. Despite physical encounters with the Orient, Orientalists prefer to rely on
    their textual knowledge at the expense of adapting to actual conditions. Said
    draws on Foucault, Napoleon, and de Lesseps to illustrate how textual knowledge
    creates the very reality described. In this case, the Orient was something wild that
    needed to be controlled. However, this was the case only because it was defined
    as such within the texts.

    Said also draws on contemporary scholars to support his ideas. For instance, he
    describes how Anwar Abdel Malek used the history of Orientalism to describe
    how the Orient became an "object" of study. At the same time, it is clear the issue
    is a contemporary one with opposing sides, as evidenced by Said's reference to
    H.A.R. Gibb.

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