Analysis Of Edward Said’s Idea Of Orientalism

Edward Said was a Palestinian literary activist and theorist following the French philosopher Michel Foucault and post-modernists. He was a key theorist of the post-colonial movement, aiming to put race and ethnicity into social theory. Foucault was a great influence on the development of Said’s ideas, who studied the origins of key ideas of texts and images, which is known as genealogy, by excavating them to extract what is meaning, known as archaeology. Through excavating the past, it enabled a better understanding of how the world was presented and how particular ideas emerged. Said also used Foucault’s theory of power-knowledge and on discourses to explore the way different cultures have been spoken about which enabled Said to develop his idea of Orientalism. It could be argued that Foucault’s concept of discourse has had a fundamental role in the shaping of Said’s analysis of Orientalism, and that without having prior knowledge of Foucault, it would be difficult to understand Said’s thesis.

Said’s work on Orientalism is arguably one of the most important texts that presents a harsh attack on the West’s construction of the Orient. Said defines Orientalism as a specific way of representing and talking about the Orient. He argues that it is “a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western experience”. Said focused on inequality and representation, creating an Orientalist discourse. His writing on Orientalism was foundational to the emerging field of post-colonial theory along with debates on colonialism and how it affected the lives of those in the global South and the North. He argued that the relationship between the Occident, the West, and the Orient, the East, is that of power with varying degrees of hegemony. He explored how the colonised were portrayed as the ‘Other’ in comparison to the Occident’s civilised society, which subsequently revealed how racism was the underpinning factor of colonialism.

Using books, art and documents, all produced by Western academics, these sources depict an impression of the Orient, often negative, which is then reproduced by the West. Said recognised a distinction between American Orientalism and Anglo/French Orientalism, he wrote a lot on the Israel and Palestine conflicts, arguing that the conflict has only been viewed through an American lens. He defined American Orientalism as being more political, about global wars, global politics and global power, whereas Anglo/French Orientalism is about historical colonialism, and he links them to other countries around the world as colonial powers.

The discourses of Orientalism are ahistorical, meaning that they have not changed since the Orient was first found, illustrating that the ideas of the Orient are resistant to change. Even as the Orient develops those from the East are still perceived to be living in an uncivilised, unlawful and immoral society. As a consequence, the West is portrayed as a monolith and the study of the Orient thus perpetuates prejudices about the East, consequently making it easier to belittle them and justify their domination. While Said’s ideas have proved to be extremely influential, he has still experienced some criticism, the most simplistic yet prevailing of them being that he treats the West as a unified whole. By doing so, he does not account for differences between cultures within the West. Interestingly, it could be argued that Said does the very same thing to Europe that he claims the Europeans do to the Orient. Meanwhile, Said has also been criticised because it appears that he has selectively read the evidence that emphasised the negative portrayals of the Islamic world, whilst ignoring the positive portrayals, even though many were written by the same authors he cited.

Despite these criticisms, Said’s work maintains a significant contemporary relevance. For example, after 9/11, the ‘war on terror’ was launched by the United States. The US were able to justify their military involvement by ‘othering’ Muslims, drawing boundaries between the modern West and the pre-modern East, labelling the Islamic terrorists as opposed to modernity, backward and sexist. Orientalism can be found in Western depictions of Arab cultures and can be used in contemporary society to understand how some ethnic groups are represented post 9/11.

The fact it is claimed that Said’s work has enabled scholars to stop using a Eurocentric perspective in addition to solidifying post-colonial theory, which Said is believed to have created, demonstrates that Said’s work has had a significant role in shaping sociology as a discipline. Furthermore, his work on Orientalism highlights the inaccuracies of many assumptions, questioning the paradigms of belief that are accepted academically, individually and politically. Because of Said’s work on Orientalism, it is easy to understand why it has been claimed that “a single book changed the meta-discourse on what we were doing and what we should be doing”. This reinforces how much of an impact Said has had, not just on sociology but across multiple disciplines.

References

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