Edward Said and His Perspectives on Orientalism - Essay Example

Edward Said and his perspectives on Orientalism, post-colonial theory and feminism Introduction Edward Said is famous for his seminal work Orientalism, published in 1978, which launched a direct assault on the notions of orientalism. According to Said, Orientalism was a mechanism used by the western nations for imposing imperial dominance on their eastern counterparts. There is a connection between Said’s theories on colonial knowledge-power, and Gramsci’s Marxist theories on hegemony. Said also based his notions on Foucault’s theories of knowledge and power relationships, and claimed that western perspectives of imperial dominance and knowledge were closely interlinked, thus suggesting concurrence between western desire for power and knowledge. Earlier Nietzsche in his writings had claimed that knowledge was subjective in nature and is always used to serve some purpose or interest, the most important one being the desire to dominate. According to Said, “no one has ever devised a method for detaching a scholar from the circumstances of his life, from the fact of his involvement (conscious or unconscious) with a class, a set of beliefs, a social position, or from the mere activity of being a member of society” (1977: 136). Said in his analyses discussed cultural representations that act as foundation for western perceptions of the oriental (primarily the Middle East nations), and how the west typifies the east. The Orientalism discusses the underlying prejudice of the western world against oriental people, mainly the Islamic people and their traditions (Said, 2001). This tends to derive from western world’s long tradition of creating wrong images representing the Middle Eastern nations and Asia. Such perspectives, and their cultural representations, still serve the imperialist ambitions of the western nations (formerly Europe’s ruling regimes, and currently the US). At the same time, Said also attacked the Arab rulers for internalising and promoting the wrong portrayal of Islamic culture, which were framed by the anglophile Orientalists (Irwin, 2006). In recent times, it would be not too farfetched to say that the US seems to view Arabs either as terrorists or as oil producers. Almost no details of the actual lives and culture of the Arab people permeate down to those whose duty it is to present the Islamic world to the western people. This has resulted in a number of tasteless caricatures of the Muslim world that has turned the oriental world into a vulnerable place for western nations to launch military attacks (Said, 1980). Said further contended that “it is [not] an accident, therefore, that recent talk of U.S. military intervention in the Arabian Gulf (which began at least five years ago, well before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan) has been preceded by a long period of Islams rational presentation through the cool medium of television and through "objective" Orientalist study: in many ways our actual situation today bears a chilling resemblance to the nineteenth-century British and French examples previously cited” (Said, 1980: 492). In this context, the essay will analyse Said’s perceptions on orientalism, his postcolonial theories and his notions on feminism. Discussion Said and orientalism In Orientalism, it was contended that studies on Islamic culture and heritage by the western scholars was a political process to establish European domination, instead of being an objective process aimed at only acquiring knowledge and learning about oriental cultures. Therefore, according to Said, orientalism worked as a process for creating a cultural division that served for the benefit of the imperial regime, falsely creating the notion that western Orientalists had better knowledge about the Orient, than the Orientals themselves (Said, 1977). In the history of colonial rule and political domination of the East by the West, there have been politically motivated distortions in the writings of all Western Orientalists; hence, rendering the term ‘Orientalism’ into a derogatory word (Buruma, 2008). Said argued that “I doubt if it is controversial, for example, to say that an Englishman in India, or Egypt, in the later nineteenth century, took an interest in those countries, which was never far from their status, in his mind, as British colonies. To say this may seem quite different from saying that all academic knowledge about India and Egypt is somehow tinged and impressed with, violated by, the gross political fact” (1977: 11). In Orientalism Said further stated that Western analyses on the East shows it as weak, illogical, and feminine in nature, when compared to the West that had been portrayed as strong, logical, and masculine. This form of analysis is derived from the western psychological requirement for creating a cultural partisanship between East and West; wherein the projected cultural differences are shown to have derived from non-changeable cultural characteristics that are an integral part of the Oriental people. Said contended that there was a persistent conditioning of the minds of the western people which led to the firm believe in the concept of western superiority over its eastern counterparts. As they gained hegemony through colonial conquests, this ‘supposed’ cultural superiority of the West was turned into a ‘scientific truth’ that motivated more westerners to enter deeper into the eastern lands to save and civilise the easterners, especially the native women (Said, 1977). The imperialists used this metonymy to create a false sense of urge among the westerners, to journey into remote hinterlands in order to civilise the natives, which soon became a ‘white man’s burden’ (Said, 1977). At the same time, it created a sense of inferiority and a desire to surrender among the natives that was supposedly aimed at rescuing them from their sub-human existence and restoring them their rightful human status. According to Said, the creation of the theory of Orientalism served one key purpose, where it traversed the discriminative process, which builds up the ‘European identity,’ the idea that “European identity [is] a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures” (1977: 133). This led to the establishment of a collective notion ‘us’ that distinguished “us Europeans as against all those non-Europeans” through Orientalism (1977:134). Therefore, it is evident that the so-called theory of Orientalism was created out of an overbearing western psychology, and ‘scientific truths were established not by presenting empirical facts, but by repressions, false projections, and clever framing of colonial ambitions. Said (1977) contended that the comprehensive discourse on Orientalism is derived owing to the nature of European sovereignty that started during the Renaissance, wherein the missionary, the scholar, the soldier and others thought about Orientalism while being stationed in such colonial states, or they analysed it without much interference from the actual Orients. Under such circumstances during the late eighteenth century, there was created a picture of ‘the Orient’ that was made suitable for academic studies, museum display, and for use in various anthropological, historical and racial studies that led to the development of further sociocultural and economic theories on the subject. While Said’s analysis of Orientalism raised a great deal of debates within the academic world, his writings were more politically oriented, where he exposed the hidden connections between colonial conquests and Europe’s seeming desire to gain knowledge. Despite his revolutionary analyses of how westerners treated their eastern counterparts, his views on imperialist representations of women fail to match the wide-scale damages that western feminists and colonial writers have inflicted for more than a century on the images of oriental societies and native women. Said and feminism The western feminists and orientalists tend to standardise eastern societies and their women, and then create an essence around them without actually understanding the basic historical and cultural variations between the two groups. They divide the human civilisation into two groups, westerners and non-westerners or Orientals, and frame the cultural notions that East and West are fundamentally different, and some of the imperial feminists tend to place these two worlds in two opposite directions, especially in the context of gender representations. Typically the oriental or native women are shown as traditional, poor, ignorant, uneducated, family-oriented, and victimised, while the western women are represented as modern and educated beings with complete control over their sexualities, and independent enough to make decisions, which further highlights the so-called differences between the eastern and western women. In their writings the colonial authors showed eastern men in villainous roles where they are mostly involved in trading with female bodies. Depicted as captors, these men were shown to bring women under their predatory grasp, for using as slaves or to trade with, with no feelings for them as fellow human beings (Kabbani, 1988). This form of negative portrayal was consciously designed to create an image, depicting ‘cruel’ eastern men, as against ‘civilised’ western men. Orientalism depicted women as passive, helpless creatures, unable to raise their voices demanding their rights, while waiting for ‘civilised’ western men to rescue them. Therefore, we find that while western society was pitted against their eastern counterparts, there was also a constant propaganda against the so-called inhuman treatment of eastern women as against their free and modern western counterparts, with the sole aim of supporting the conceived theory of superiority of western nations, over the orient. Despite the western world being rooted in patriarchal societies (especially during the Victorian era), the western feminists and Orientalists did not refrain from constructing an impression that European societies, western men and western women were more civilised, hence superior to their Asian or African counterparts. This formed to be a part of the political project of colonising oriental nations, where there was widespread suppression of all kind of indigenous cultures (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, 1995). Colonial propaganda in a planned manner destroyed cultural heritage and local languages by adopting a process where they brought in European language, culture and education style, in order to civilise the natives. Thus, there came into existence the concept of double colonisation, where the rulers and orientalists both worked towards the same goal. The Orientalists made up entertaining stories that sensualised native women and brought forth a vulgar picture, where women were humiliated twice, first as Orientals and then as women. Another typical characteristic of the eastern women as portrayed in orientalism was their overt sexualisation, wherein oriental women, especially the Muslim ones, were shown as being preoccupied with sex most of the times (Cohen, 1988). Such false representations rendered the oriental women as physical objects to be used for mere pleasure, readily available for all European men to gratify their needs. Said is harshly critical of the Orientalism objective that consciously creates a “web of racism, cultural stereotypes, political imperialism, dehumanizing ideology,” and lends the orient a humiliating social and political identity (Said, 1994: 95). Orientalism portrayal of Muslim women and their involvement in harem fantasies has a deeper political objective of forcibly occupying oriental lands on the excuse of liberating native women from patriarchal societies and their harem culture. According to Said, this form of ‘cultural representation’ of women along with the ‘institutional forces’ in western societies established a social order that turned women into physical commodities and further subjugated them in their social standing. Despite Said’s detailed analyses, and revolutionary theories, there are many criticisms of his writings. Among Said’s critical opponents were Bernard Lewis and Robert Graham Irwin. Another critic of Said’s works, Nikki Keddie, in his interview with Nancy Gallagher, contended that Saids theories on Orientalism brought in some unwanted results, and “there has been a tendency in the Middle East field to adopt the word Orientalism as a generalized swear-word, essentially referring to people who take the ‘wrong’ position on the Arab–Israeli dispute, or to people who are judged ‘too conservative’”(1994: 144-145). Furthermore, he added that it has now become fashionable for people to reject writings by certain scholars, blaming them as works of ‘Orientalism,’ and while Edward Said did not wish to bring in such consequences, unfortunately, the word has turned into some sort of a catchword. Conclusion Orientalism by Edward Said is an extensive analysis of social, cultural and political studies of the European colonisation processes, which challenges the falsely created concept under the term Orientalism, and subsequent cultural divisions between the superior west and inferior east. According to Said, with the start of colonisation the Europeans suddenly became aware of the eastern countries, and finding their civilisation to be exotic, created Orientalism that was supposedly a scientific study of the natives residing in these countries. According to Said, in their quest to dominate and expand their empire, the Europeans created a false division of ‘us’ (Europeans) and the ‘others’ (Orientals), wherein the former was claimed to be civilised and the later barbaric in nature. This way the Europeans could establish themselves as a superior race, which helped in justifying their colonisation and expansion agendas. The portrayal of women in such works were doubly degrading, as first, they were humiliated as Orientals, and secondly, they were further humiliated as weak women subjugated within a cruel patriarchal society. Thus, Said highlighted the connection that existed between Europe’s need to gain knowledge and the desire to forcibly occupy more eastern lands, and according to him, Orientalism was a part of the imperial dominance project, carefully chalked out to create the impression of a superior West and an inferior East that needed western help in order to be civilised. References Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G., and Tiffin, H., 1995. The Post-colonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge. Cohen, B., 1988. An Anthropologist among Historians and Other Essays. Delhi: OUP. Buruma, I., 2008. Orientalism? Not a word of endearment. The Guardian, accessed 30th April 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/jun/16/middleeast.islam Irwin, R., 2006. For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies, London: Allen Lane. Kabbani, F., 1988. Europe’s Myths of Orient: Devise and Rule. London: Pandora Press. Keddie, N., 1994. “Interview with Nikki Keddie”. In, Nancy Elizabeth Gallagher (ed.) Approaches to the History of the Middle East: Interviews with Leading Middle East Historians. London: Ithaca Press. Said, E., 2001. Power, Politics and Culture. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Said, E., 1994. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage. Said, E., 26 April 1980. “Islam Through Western Eyes.” Nation, 488-92. Said, E., 1977. Orientalism. London: Penguin. Read More