comp Edward Said

Orientalism

“the orient” is kind of a western invention that by the late 20th c is now ending
“The orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of
romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences. Now it
was disappearing; it a sense it had happened, its time was over” (1)

three meanings of “orientalism”

1. referring to “oriental studies"

2. refers to an ‘ontological and epistemological’ distinction that’s made whenever the
west, or ‘occident’ considers the east or ‘orient'

“Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction

made between ‘the orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the occident’” (2)

and 3. "Orientalism is a Western style of dominating, restructuring, and having authority over
the orient.” (3)

follows foucault’s conception of discourse, Said argues that “without examining

Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possible understand the enormously systematic
discipline by which European culture was able to manage— and even produce— the Orient
politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the
post-Enlightenment period.” (3)

orientalism is more about how the west thinks about itself

“European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the orient as a
sort of surrogate and even underground self” (3).

it’s not about the “real” orient but western ideas about the orient
“The phenomenon of Orientalism as I study it here deals principally, not with a
correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the internal consistency of
Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient…despite or beyond any correspondence, or lack
thereof, with a ‘real’ Orient” (5).

the west’s flexible positional superiority

“Orientalism depends for its strategy on this flexible positional superiority, which puts the
westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him
the relative upper hand” (8)
the orient is fascinating to the west from a whole range of unique angles, but in each type of
relationship there is an assumed power dynamic that favours the west

challenges of positionality, critique of liberalism and the production of knowledge

“no one has ever devised a method for detaching the scholar from the circumstances of life,
form the fact of his involvement (conscious or unconscious) with a class, ret of beliefs, a
social position, or form the mere activity of being a member of a society …

“What i am interested i doing now is suggesting how the general liberal consensus that ’true’
knowledge is fundamentally nonpolitical (and conversely that overtly political knowledge is
not ’true’ knowledge) obscures the highly if obscurely organized political circumstances
obtaining when knowledge is produced(10)

we approach the orient as Westerners first, then as individuals

“If it is true that no production of knowledge in the human sciences can ever ignore or
disclaim its author’s involvement as a human subject in his own circumstances, the it must
also be true that for a European of American studying in the Orient there can be no
disclaiming the main circumstances of his actuality: that he comes up agains the Orient as a
European or American first, as an individual second” (11)

he’s problematizing the marxist thing about culture always being downstream from
politics. for Said, individual cultural production and commentary has real poltical
consequences
“to believe that politics in the form of imperialism bears upon the production of literature,
scholarship, social theory, and history writing is by no means equivalent to saying that culture
is therefore a demeaned or denigrated thing. Quite the contrary: my whole point is to say that
we can better understand the persistence and the durability of saturating hegemonic systems
like culture when we realize that their internal contains upon writers and thinkers were
productive, not unilaterally inhibiting… I study orientalism as a dynamic exchange between
individual authors and the large political concerns shaped by the three great empires - british,
french, american— in whose intellectual and imaginative territory the writing was produced”
(14-15)

he’s really interested in this question of human agency: how can we conceive of orientalism
as “willed human work” (not to get too off track here but your anthropocene stuff could
benefit from a similar angle i think)

authority
“There is nothing mysterious or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated, disseminated;
it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status, it establishes canons of test and value; it is
virtually indistinguishable form certain ideas it dignifies as true, and from traditions,
perceptions, and judgements it forms, transmits, reproduces. Above all, authority can, indeed
must, be analyzed. All these attributes of authority apply to Orientalism, and much of what I
do in this study is to describe both the historical authority in the personal authorities of
Orientalism.

orientalism makes the actual people of the orient unreal, they are replaced by the orientalist
works that aim to speak for them.
Culture And Imperialism
written after orientalism

what is culture
“as i used the word, ‘culture’ means two things in particular. First of al it means all those
practices, like the arts of description, communication, and representation, that have relative
autonomy from the economic, social ,and political realms and that often exist in aesthetic
forms, for of whose principal aims is pleasure (xii)

“second, and almost imperceptibly, culture is a concept that includes a refining and elevating
element, each society’s reservoir of the best that has been known and thought” (xiii)

narrative
“stories are at the heart of what explorers and novelists say about strange regions of the
world; they also become the method colonized people use to assert their own identity and
the existence of their own history.” (xii)

more on individual v society

“I do not believe that authors are mechanically determined by ideology, class, or economic
history, but authors are, i also believe, very much in the history of their societies, shaping and
shaped by that history and their social experience in different measure”

how we formulate or represent the past informs our understanding of the present

“imperialism” means the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan
centre ruling a distant territory; “colonialism,” which is almost always a consequence of
imperialism, is the implanting of settlement on distant territory” (9)

how does imperialism impact culture, how does cultural production respond to
imperialism
“What i want to examine is how the processes of imperialism occurred beyond the level of
economic laws and political decision, and— by predisposition, by the authority of
recognizable cultural formations, by continuing consolidation within education, literature, and
the visual and musical arts— were manifestival at another very significant level, that of
national culture, which we have tended to sanitize as a realm of unchanging intellectual
moments, free from worldly affiliations” (12-13)
(really good position for a critic…. again, you should do a similar thing re anthropocene)

good critique of “specialization” in academia

Recent intellectual and academic discourse has tended to separate and divide these: most scholars are special-
ists; most ofthe attention that is endowed with the status ofexpertise is given to fairly autonomous subjects, e.g.,
the Victorian industrial novel, French colonial policy in North Africa, and so forth. The tendency for fields and
specializations to subdivide and proliferate, I have for a long while argued, is contrary to an understanding ofthe
whole, when the character, interpreta- tion, and direction or tendency ofcultural experience are at issue. To lose
sight of or ignore the national and international context of, say, Dickens's representations of Victorian
businessmen, and to focus only on the internal coherence of their roles in his novels is to miss an essential
connection between his fiction and its historical world.

mysterious transition from an enlightenment era understanding of “man” as a whole as

producing history, toward Europeans as the sort of implicit representatives of “man”
" The interrelationships between scholarship (or literamre, for that matter) and the instimtions of nationalism have not
been as seriously smdied as they should, but it is nevertheless evident that when most European thinkers celebrated
human- ity or culmre they were principally celebrating ideas and values they as- cribed to their own national culmre, or to
Europe as distinct from the Orient, Africa, and even the Americas.” (44’)

identifying structures of attitude and reference as the underlying logic of empire

"We are, so to speak, ofthe connections, not outside and beyond them.” (55)

ends by reiterating his thing about how we in the humanities pretend like “culture” should exist outside of
“politics” but its not true, and i guess i mean yeah thats true but this idea has been taken on in humanities
departments in kind of interesting ways (“everything is political and therefore just talking about a problem is
“doing politics”” etc.)