Orientalism
Name: Nikunj Bhatti
Roll no.:19
M.A. Semester: 3
Enrolment No.: 14101005
Year: 2015-16
Paper no.: 12
Email id.:nikunjbhatti332@gmail.com
Submitted to: Department of English
Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
Orientalism is a book
published in 1978 by Edward Said that has been greatly influential and
controversial in postcolonial studies and other fields. In the book, Said
successfully redefined the term “Orientalism” to mean a constellation of false
assumptions underlying Western attitudes toward the Middle East. Edward wadie
Said was born on 1st November, 1935 and died on 5th September, 2003. He was
Palestinian American literary theorist. First we know to discuss what is post
colonialism?
What is Post-colonialism?
Post-colonialism mean after colonialism. Post colonialism
is the study of a culture after the physical and political withdrawal of an
oppressive power.
· What
is Occident?
The occident deals with
the West countries (West means the countries of Europe, America, and France).
Occident derives from the latin word Occidens. Occident means the hemisphere
that includes North America and South America = New world or Western
hemisphere.
· What
is Orient?
The orient almost a
European invention had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings,
haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experience. The term ‘Orient’ is
derives from the Latin word ‘oriens’ is meaning ‘East’. Orient is depends on the
logic of discourse. Orients are incapable of change they are static. Orients
are incapable of change they are static.
The
relationship between Orient and Occident and is a relationship of power and
domination.
Ø What
is Orientalism?
ü The
country of the east especially East Asia.
ü Study
of orient means a study of orients.
ü Old
civilization with an old knowledge system.
ü Problem
between White and Muslim people.
ü A
story of Middle-East.
ü Strangers
by the fortune of colors.
ü Identities
are not made naturally.
ü Post
Structuralism has changed way of thinking.
ü Subjective
and objective process.
ü Orientalism
is generally means to a mental exercise and mental archrival.
The “East” as
differentiated from the “West”, which includes the Middle East, Near East,
Central Asia, South Asia and the Far East, is today top of mind with news
breaking in a stream of anxiety, fear, economic and political pressures, social
conflict, unrest and war.
“The
Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of
romance, exotic being, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable
experiences.”
The structure of orient
is nothing more than a structure of lies or the myths which, were the truth
about them to be told , would simply blow away.
Orientalism as a system
of knowledge about Orient, an accepted grid for filtering through the Orient
into Western consciousness, just as that same investment multiplied indeed made
truly productive the statements profiling out from Orientalism into the general
culture.
Orientalism is widely
considered a seminal and foundational text for postcolonial studies, a
discipline that has expanded to consider not only political systems of hegemony
and imperialism, but also power structures and relationships in philosophy,
literature, the arts and other fields.
“Orientalism is a style
of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made
between “the Orient” and “the Occident.”
“Orientalism can be
discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the
orient”.
In the Introduction
part Said divided into three parts,
• Chapter 1: The Scope of Orientalism
• Chapter 2: Orientalist Structures
and Restructures
• Chapter 3: Orientalism now
• The
Scope of Orientalism
This chapter process
two important points as given below.
ü Knowing
the Oriental
ü Imaginative
Geography and its Representation
Said delineate his
argument with several caveats as to how it may be flawed. He States that it
fails to include Russian Orientalism and explicitly excludes German
Orientalism.
Their background is the
trans-formation of the exacting, professional science of Orientalism, whose
function in nineteenth-century culture had been the restoration to Europe of a
lost portion of humanity, but which had become in the twentieth century both an
instrument of policy and, more important, a code by which Europe could
interpret both itself and the Orient to itself. (Said)
• Orientalist
Structures and Restructures
Structure of
Orientalism is nothing more than a structure of lies or of myths. In this section Said outlines how Orientalist
discourse was move from Country to Country and Political leader to author. He
advises that this discourse was set up as a foundation for all further study
and discourse of the Orient by the occident. The construction of identity — for
identity, whether of Orient or Occident, France or Britain, whiles obviously a
repository of distinct collective experiences. Edward Said points the slight
change on the attitude of the Europeans towards the Orientals.
· Orientalism
now
Orientalism can also
express the strength of the West and the Orient’s weaknesses seen by West. Such
strength and such weakness are as intrinsic to Orientalism as they are to any
view that divides the world into large. General divisions, entities that
Coexist in a state of tension produced by what is believed to be radical
difference.
Academic points of view that,
The interchange between the academic and the more or less imaginative
meaning of orientalism is a constant one, and since the late eighteenth century there has been a considerable, quite
disciplined perhaps even regulated traffic between two.
In the first place it
would be wrong to conclude that the orient was essentially an idea or a
creation with no corresponding reality. A second qualification is that ideas,
culture, and histories cannot seriously be understood or studied without their
force, or more precisely their configuration of power, also being studied.
§ The
distinction between pure and political
Here Edward Said categorize the knowledge as,
West is that
it be nonpolitical, that scholarly, academic, impartial. The Orientalism is not
a mere political subject matter or field that is reflected passively by
culture, scholarship, or institutions; or it is a representative and expressive
of some nefarious “western” imperialist plot to hold down the “Oriental” world.
§ The
methodological question
The Anglo-French-American
experience of the Arab and Islam , which for almost a thousand years together
stood for the Orient. Immediately upon doing that a large part of the Orient
seemed to have been eliminated-India, Japan, china and other sections of the
Far East- not because these regions were not important but because one could
discuss Europe's experience of the Near Orient, or of Islam, apart from its experience
of the Far Orient.
§ The
personal dimension.
In the Prison Notebooks Gramsci says: “The starting
point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and knows
thyself as a product of the historical process to date…..” Much of the personal
investment in this study derives from my awareness of being an “Oriental
"as a child growing up in two British colonies.
Ø Conclusion
In short Orientalism is not just large collection of texts. It is not
political subject matter. The corporate institution for dealing with the
Orient. Dealing it by making statement about it, authority view of it, by
teaching it, ruling over it.
Works Cited
Said, Edward.
Orientalism. Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1977.
