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How does Said define Orientalism in his introduction (1978)?
…Orientalism, a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is
based on the Orient’s special place in European Western experience.
The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of
Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of
its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one
of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other. In addition,
the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its
contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. Yet none of this
is merely imaginative. The Orient is an integral part of European
material civilization and culture. Orientalism expresses and
represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a mode of
discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship,
imagery, doctrines, and even colonial bureaucracies and colonial
styles. (Said 1-2)
…my real argument is that Orientalism is—and does not simply
represent—a considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual
culture, and as such has less to do with the Orient than it does
with “our” world. (12)
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Discourse in the work of Foucault describes ways of constituting
knowledge and the power relations between forms of knowledge and
social practices. It is more than just ways of thinking and
producing meaning, but also how certain forms of thinking and
meaning come to have authority and power.
“I am supposing that in every society the production of
discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and
redistributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose
role is to avert its powers and its dangers, to cope with chance
events, to evade its ponderous, awesome materiality.” (Foucault,
“The Discourse on Language”)
Philosopher and historian Michel Foucault (1926-1984)
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Gramsci divides society into two parts:• civil society:
“voluntary (or at least rational
and noncoercive) affiliations like schools, families, and
unions”
• political society: “state institutions (the army, the police,
the central bureaucracy) whose role in the polity is direct
domination”
“Culture, of course, is to be found operating in civil society,
where the influence of ideas, of institutions, and of other persons
works not through domination but by what Gramsci calls consent. In
any society not totalitarian, then, certain cultural forms
predominate over others; the form of this cultural leadership is
what Gramsci has identified as hegemony, an indispensible concept
for understanding of cultural life in the industrial West.” (Said
7)
Cultural hegemony describes how the ruling class controls and
manipulates cultural institutions (religion, art, popular culture)
so as to maintain political power.
Marxist political philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)
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Three interdependent meanings of Orientalism:
1. academic study and institutions: “Anyone who teaches, writes
about, or researches the Orient—and this applies whether the person
is an anthropologist, sociologist, historian, or philologist—either
in its specific or its general aspects, is an Orientalist, and what
he or she does is Orientalism” (2). [This is a dated designation,
in part because of the profound effect Said’s work had on the
academy]
2. general/imaginative meaning: “Orientalism is a style of
thought based upon an ontological [philosophy that deals with the
nature of being] and epistemological [theory of knowledge]
distinction made between “the Orient” and (most of the time) “the
Occident.” (2)
3. historical/material meaning: Since the late 18th century,
Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate
institution for dealing with the Orient – dealing with it by making
statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by
teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as
a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority
over the Orient.” (3)
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Eugène Delacroix, Death of Sardanapalus (1827)
imaginative meaning: 19th century repertory of images and ideas
about Oriental despotism, splendor, and cruelty
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Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Snake Charmer (1879)
imaginative meaning: 19th century repertory of images and ideas
Oriental mysticism and traditions
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Jean Auguste Dominque Ingres, Grande Odalisque (1815)
imaginative meaning: 19th century repertory of images and ideas
about Oriental sensuality and feminine submission (concubines,
harems, erotic dancers, etc.)
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Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Almeh (With Pipe) (1873)
Gustave Flaubert’s description of Kuchuk Hanem, an Egyptian
dancer with whom he had a brief affair in 1850:
When she bends, her flesh ripples into bronze ridges. Her eyes
are dark and enormous. Her eyebrows black, her nostrils open and
wide; heavy shoulders, full, apple-shaped breasts. (…) Her black
hair, wavy, unruly, pulled straight back on each side from a center
parting beginning at the forehead; small braids joined together at
the nape of her neck. She has one upper incisor, right, which is
beginning to go bad […] She squeezes her bare breasts together with
her jacket. She rises first on one foot, then on the other —
marvelous movement: when one foot is on the ground, the other moves
up and across in front of the shinbone — the whole thing with a
light bound. (Flaubert in Egypt 114-5)
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Gustave Moreau, The Apparition (1874-6)
Flaubert’s description of his sexual encounter with Hanem in a
private letter:
As for Kuchuk Hanem, ah! Set your mind at rest, and at the same
time correct your ideas about the Orient. You may be sure that she
felt nothing at all: emotionally, I guarantee; and even physically,
I strongly suspect. She found us very good cawadjas (seigneurs),
because we left a goodly number of piastres behind, that’s all. (…)
The oriental woman is no more than a machine: she makes no
distinction between one man and another. Smoking, going to the
baths, painting her eyelids and drinking coffee—such is the circle
of occupations within which her existence is confined. As for
physical pleasure, it must be very slight, since the famous button,
the seat thereof, is sliced off at an early age. What makes this
woman, in a sense, so poetic, is that she relapses into the state
of nature. (Letters 181)
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To be made Oriental
The Orient was Orientalized not only because it was discovered
to be “Oriental” in all those ways considered commonplace by an
average nineteenth-century European, but also because it could
be—that is, submitted to being—made Oriental. There is very little
consent to be found, for example, in the fact that Flaubert’s
encounter with an Egyptian courtesan produced a widely influential
model of the Oriental woman; she never spoke of herself, she never
represented her emotions, presence, or history. He spoke for and
represented her. He was foreign, comparatively wealthy, male, and
these were historical facts of domination that allowed him not only
to possess Kuchuk Hanem physically but to speak for her and tell
his readers in what way she was “typically Oriental.” (Said
5-6)
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How does this collective imagination of Eastern exoticism
animate contemporary popular culture?
One aspect of the electronic, postmodern world is that there has
been a reinforcement of the stereotypes by which the Orient is
viewed. Television, the films, and all the media’s resources have
forced information into more and more standardized molds. So far as
the Orient is concerned, standardization and cultural stereotyping
have intensified the hold of the nineteenth-century academic and
imaginative demonology of the “mysterious Orient.” (26)
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Walt Disney Features, Aladdin (1992)
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WED Enterprises/Walt Disney Imagineering, It’s a Small World
(1966)
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Coldplay featuring Beyoncé, music video for “Hymn for the
Weekend” (2016)
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Three qualifications about history, knowledge, and power
• “We must take seriously Vico’s great observation that men
make their own history, that what they can know is what they have
made, and extend it to geography: as both geographical and cultural
entities—to say nothing of historical entities—such locals,
regions, geographical sectors as “Orient” and “Occident” are
man-made. […] it would be wrong to conclude that the Orient was
essentially an idea, or a creation with no corresponding reality.
[…] There were—and are—cultures and nations whose location is in
the East, and their lives, histories, and customs have a brute
reality obviously greater than anything that could be said about
them in the West.” (5)
• “Ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be
understood or studies without their force, or more precisely their
configurations of power, also being studied. […] The relationship
between the Occident and the Orient is a relationship of power, of
domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony…” (5)
• “One ought never to assume that the structure of Orientalism
is nothing more than a structure of lies or of myths which, were
the truth about them to be told, would simply blow away. […]
Orientalism, therefore, is not an airy European fantasy about the
Orient, but a created body of theory and practice in which, for
many generations, there has been considerable material investment.”
(6)
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Moralistic power: “Us” versus “them”
Orientalism is never far from…a collective notion identifying
“us” Europeans as against all of “those” non-Europeans, and indeed
it can be argued that the major component in European culture is
precisely what made that culture hegemonic both in and outside
Europe: the idea of European identity as a superior one in
comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures. There is
in addition the hegemony of European ideas about the Orient,
themselves reiterating European superiority over Oriental
backwardness, usually overriding the possibility that a more
independent, or more skeptical, thinking might have had different
views on the matter. In a quite constant way, Orientalism depends
for its strategy 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. (7)
[Orientalism] is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with
various kinds of power, …[including] power moral (as with ideas
about what “we” do and what “they” cannot do or understand as “we”
do). (12)
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How Orientalism relates to Prof. Lazo’s reading of the war on
terror
• Said in 1993 on the rhetorical application of Orientalism to
the war on terror:
“Islam’s role in hijackings and terrorism, descriptions of the
way in which overtly Muslim countries like Iran threaten ‘us’ and
our way of life, and speculations about the latest conspiracy to
blow up buildings, sabotage commercial airliners, and poison water
supplies seem to play increasingly on Western consciousness.”
• Lazo’s emphasis on the rhetorical aspects of the war on
terror:
• Construction of the idea of a terrorist based on a set of
popular connotations (anti-American, anti-democratic, evil, access
to dangerous weapons, isolates action from other acts of violence,
etc.)
• “Clash of the civilization” based on binaries between the
East and West, Christianity and Islam, “us” vs. “them”
• Explication of the language of “shadowy terrorist networks,”
supposition and hypothetical scenarios in President G.W. Bush’s
State of the Union speech of 2003
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Edward Said, “Islam and the West are inadequate banners” (The
Guardian, September 16, 2001)
“This is a war against terrorism, everyone says, but where, on
what fronts, for what concrete ends? No answers are provided,
except the vague suggestion that the Middle East and Islam are what
“we” are up against, and that terrorism must be destroyed. What is
most depressing, however, is how little time is spent trying to
understand America's role in the world, and its direct involvement
in the complex reality beyond the two coasts that have for so long
kept the rest of the world extremely distant and virtually out of
the average American's mind. You'd think that 'America' was a
sleeping giant rather than a superpower almost constantly at war,
or in some sort of conflict, all over the Islamic domains. Osama
bin Laden's name and face have become so numbingly familiar to
Americans as in effect to obliterate any history he and his shadowy
followers might have had before they became stock symbols of
everything loathsome and hateful to the collective
imagination.”
“Besides, much as it has been quarrelled over by Muslims, there
isn't a single Islam: there are Islams, just as there are Americas.
This diversity is true of all traditions, religions or nations even
though some of their adherents have futiley tried to draw
boundaries around themselves and pin their creeds down neatly. Yet
history is far more complex and contradictory than to be
represented by demagogues who are much less representative than
either their followers or opponents claim.”
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Think about how much binary between us versus them is used in
the contemporary political landscape (across the political
spectrum):
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Reading Waiting for the Barbarians Thematically and Formally •
Novel as a genre: fictitious prose narrative of book length,
typically representing
character and action with some degree of realism (OED)
• Prof. Lazo asked questions both about the themes of the
novel: • Blindness: How does the tension of seeing/not seeing and
the inability to see
emerge at various points in the novel? • Cleanliness: How does
the magistrate’s obsession with physical cleanliness
speak to his desire to keep his own conscience clean?• Empire:
How does this narrative thematize the operations of empire
across
time and space? Is this imperial Rome, colonial America, or
apartheid-era South Africa? Or is this an allegory for multiple
empires?
• Civilization vs. barbarism: How are barbarians described? Who
is on the inside and who is on the outside of “civilization”?
• As well as questions about the formal strategies of the
novel:• What is the role of the narrator? How does he describe
himself at various
points in the book, that is, how is he characterized?• How does
Coetzee handle the characterization of other figures in the
novel?• How does Coetzee build the setting of the novel?• What is
the effect of omission and limited description on the
narrative?
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Narrative Voice in Waiting for the Barbarians • Does the
narrator speak in the first, second, or third person, or are
there
shifts in point of view? • Is the story narrated in the past or
present tense? Does the verb tense
affect your reading of it in any way? • Does the narrator use a
distinctive vocabulary, style, and tone, or is the
language more standard and neutral? • Are there shifts in
vernacular or style? Is the narrator identified as a
character, and if so, how much does he or she participate in the
action? • Does the narrator ever address the reader directly or
explicitly state
opinions or values? • Is the narrator omniscient to all
characters’ thoughts, or is the narrative
perspective limited? • Does the narrative voice or focus shift
during the story remain
consistent? • Do the narrator, the characters, and the reader
all perceive matters in
the same way, or are there differences in levels of
understanding? • How are events sequenced? • Are there any
unusual formal devices at work in the narrative strategy?
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Narrative Strategies in Waiting for the Barbarians For example,
think about the parenthetical asides to the reader:
He tells me about the last great drive he rode in, when
thousands of deer, pigs, bears were slain, so many that a mountain
of carcasses had to be left to rot (“Which was a pity”). (1)
(At a certain point I begin to plead my own cause.) (5)
He hears me out, even (I have the feeling) leads me on a little.
(11)
(On the other hand, who am I to assert my distance from him? I
drink with him, I eat with him, I show him the sights, I afford him
every assistance as his letter of commission requests, and more.
The Empire does not require that its servants love each other,
merely that they perform their duty.) (6)
(Or is it only in the provinces that headsmen and torturers are
still thought of as unclean?) Looing at him I wonder how he felt
the very first time; did he, invited as an apprentice to twist the
pincers or turn the screw or whatever it is they do, shudder even a
little to know that at the instant he was trespassing into the
forbidden? (12)
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How to prepare for the midterm?
• Make sure that you have carefully read all of the texts in
the class to date this quarter (including all of the shorter texts
from the HCC Guide and Reader with special emphasis on Douglass and
Coetzee).
• Carefully review your lecture notes and Prof. Fahs and Lazo’s
Powerpoints. Think about key concepts, their own
theses/interpretive claims about the material, and important
images.
• Carefully review your notes from section, especially the “key
concepts” that we have discussed.
• Review your answers to the study questions for Weeks 1 &
2, Dershowitz/Scarry, Edward Said, Elaine Scarry, and J.M. Coetzee.
While they won’t be in that exact form on the midterm, those are
certainly “fair game” subjects for short-answer questions (and they
will help you review the material for your essay question as
well).