Orientalism

Orientalism Paper: 11 The Postcolonial Literature

Kaushal [email protected]

PG Enrollment No: BU13141001177MA Sem.:3Roll No: 12

Department of English Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji

Bhavnagar University

October 03,2014

What is Orientalism?

♦ Lexical background

♦ Orient

♦ Occident

♦ Orient culture

Edward Said

♦Meaning of Orientalism

♦ A Book:

♦ Imperialism

♦ Power politics

The definition of Orientalism

Said (1978) argued that European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself of against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self, defining Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient. He presented the important hypothesis in his book, Orientalism, that without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage--and even produce--the Orient (Said, 1978).

Orient Map

Edward Said’s Orientalism ♦ Said’s Orientalism can be a critical tool to

examine the validity of all the literature on the East written by the Westerners. Influenced by the imperialism and colonialism of the 19th century, Western people became interested in the natives and the cultures of Western colonies. ♦ This led to the advent of anthropology as related to Darwinian Evolutionism and Hegelian Progressivism in The Philosophy of History. Exponents of evolutionism believed that culture generally develops and evolves from primitive stages into advanced ones.　 (Nakamura, 1998)

Edward Said’s Orientalism

“Orientalism (1978) by the Palestinian-American scholar from of Michel Foucault’s historicist critique of discourages to analyze what he called “cultural imperialism”. This mode of disseminating in subjugated colonies a Eurocentric discourage that assumed the normality and preeminence of every representations of the “Oriental” as an orientalist is now sometimes applied to cultural imperialism by means of the control of discourage, not only in the orient, but anywhere in the world.

[From M.H. Abrams- A Handbook of Literary Terms]

Said’s Conviction

♦ Said (1981) emphasizes the following point: ♦ Underlying every interpretation of other

cultures is the choice facing the individual scholar or intellectual; whether to put intellect at the service of power or at the service of criticism, communities, and moral sense.16

♦ To use Said's phrase, Benedict faces the conflict; whether to put her intellect at the service of the American power as an Orientalist or at the service of an understanding of Japanese cultural identity as a relativist. (Nakamura, 1998).

Edward Said writes, “…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 civilization and language, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other.”

Beyond Orientalism and Occidentalism

♦ European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself of against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self, defining Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient (Said, 1978).

♦ Stereotyped portrayals of Westerners appear in many works of Indian, Chinese and Japanese artist during this period. The Ideals of the East by Tenshin Okakura.

Important quotes

♦ They Cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.

~ Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Brumaire

♦ The East is a career.~ Benjamin Disraeli, Tancred

Conclusion

♀ To conclude my point, I would like say, Orientalism was written to show European-American power to the Orient and the mystification of “the Orient” as we saw earlier, the Western’s view towards the East which is discussed by Said in this book. He shows the European-Western Imperial power along wit the confused feelings of the Oriental countries towards the Western power.

References

♦ Abrams, M. H. A Handbook of Literary Terms. London: Cengage Learning , 2011.

♦ Orientalism (book). <http://wikipedia.org/wiki/orientalism(book)>.

♦ Said, Edward W. Orientalism. England: Penguin, 1978.

Thank You…

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