Edward Said: "Orientalism"

Edward Said’s Orientalism is my favorite reading so far. His arguments are very clear, and he gives various examples, which makes it easy to follow what he is trying to say. Since my presentation tomorrow will be on this reading I will not tell you much about my personal opinion/thoughts, I will leave it for tomorrow and for the discussion. So I’m going to make a brief summary with some of the quotes that I think are important.

Said gives different definitions of Orientalism, he starts off by saying “I shall be calling Orientalism, a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in Eurupean Western experience” (p. 1). What does this mean? Simply put I think what he’s trying to say here is that Orientalism is basically the relative view of the Orient, from the Western point of view. We can say that this notion is a way of defining the self by defining the other. As he goes on to say, “the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West)” (p. 1). Which is really interesting.

Well then the question is what is the Orient, which helps in defining the West? Said’s answer to this is that there are no such things really as the “Orient” and the “Occident”, and that these are “man-made” (p. 5). “The Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West” (p.5).

In section II of the Introduction the author gives three qualifications about Orientalism. To make this brief and clear (since he says them so eloquently) I will quote three sentences that summarize them:
1. “It would be wrong to conclude that the Orient was essentially an idea, of a creation with no corresponding reality” (p. 5)
2. “ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be understood or studied without their force, or more precisely their configurations of power, also being studied …the relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony” (p. 5)
(The second part of point 2 seems very important in the discussion.)
3. “Orientalism is more particularly valuable as a sign of European-Atlantic power over the Orient than it is as a veridic discourse about the Orient” (p. 6)

Said talks about three aspects of his contemporary reality, which are:
1. The distinction between pure and political knowledge. I will go into this section in detail for my presentation tomorrow because I found it very important specially for students of literature.
2. The methodological question. In this section he talks about the difficulty of approaching the question of Orientalism and its study, the method of doing so.
3. The personal dimension. Which to me seemed really important because often I’m told that when it comes to academic work I need to completely leave out anything that is personal (even if I have academic backing). So you can imagine how happy I was seeing that Said specifically speaks about the personal dimension of his study and I would like to quote that Said quotes from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks “ ‘The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory…therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory” (p. 25)

Alright, I think as a simple introductory summery this should be enough for now. And hopefully tomorrow we’ll have more of a discussion.