Edward Said's signature contribution to academic life is the book Orientalism.
Said focuses his attention in this work on the interplay between the "Occident" and the "Orient." The Occident is his term for the West (England, France, and the United States), and the Orient is the term for the romantic and misunderstood East (compromising of the Middle East and Far East).
According to Said, the West has created a dichotomy, between the reality of the East and the romantic notion of the "Orient. The Middle East and Asia are viewed with prejudice and racism. They are backward and unaware of their own history and culture. To fill this void, the West has created a culture, history, and future promise for them. On this framework rests not only the study of the Orient, but also the political imperialism of Europe in the East.
The Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. Yet none of this Orient 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, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles. . . .
Orientalism would come to mean many interdependent things. The most readily accepted designation for Orientalism is an academic one, and indeed the label still serves in a number of academic 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 says or does is Orientalism. . .
"Orientalism is then, a style of thought that is based on Ontological and epistemological distinctions between the 'Orient' and the 'Occident'. Orientalism was ultimately a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, West, "us") and the strange (the Orient, the East, "them").”
Edward Said was especially influenced by the writing of Michel Foucault, especially his notion that academic disciplines do not simply produce knowledge but also generate power. Said uses Foucault to argue that Orientalism helped produce European imperialism. He borrowed from Foucault the notion of a “discourse,” the ideological framework within which scholarship takes place. Within a discourse, all representations are tainted by the language, culture, institutions, and political ambience of the representer. Hence there can be no “truths,” Said argues, only formations or deformations.
Said, like Foucault, denies the concept of knowledge for its own sake; according to his method, knowledge is always connected to political, sociological, economic and other power systems. It is formed by interactions with political power (such as colonial institutions), intellectual power (such as the dominant sciences, and among them comparative philology), and with cultural power.
THE HISTORY OF ORIENTALISM:
Said makes the claim that the whole of Western European and American scholarship, literature, and cultural representation and stereotype creates and reinforces prejudice against non-Western cultures, putting them in the classification of Oriental (or "Others"). The heart of the matter in understanding Orientalism is this power relationship and how the Occident has used and continues to use and understand the Orient on its own terms.
Said asserts that according to the Occidentals, the Orientals had no history or culture independent of their colonial masters. Orientalism is more an indicator of the power the West holds over the Orient, than about the Orient itself. Creating an image of the Orient and a body of knowledge about the Orient and subjecting it to systematic study became the prototype for taking control of the Orient. By taking control of the scholarship, the West also took political and economic control.
THE 3 BROAD CLAIMS:1) The First is that Orientalism, although purporting to be an objective, disinterested, and rather esoteric field, in fact functioned to serve political ends. Orientalist scholarship provided the means through which Europeans could take over Oriental lands. Colonial rule was justified in advance by Orientalism rather than after the fact. Overall, Said submits, his work demonstrates the metamorphosis of a relatively innocuous philological sub specialty into a capacity for managing political movements, administering colonies, making nearly apocalyptic statements representing the White Man’s difficult civilizing mission.
2)His second claim is that Orientalism helped define Europe’s self-image. “It has less to do with the Orient than it does with the Occident. The construction of identity in every age and every society, Said maintains, involves establishing opposites and “Others”. This happens because “the development and maintenance of every culture require the existence of another different and competing alter ego. Orientalism led the West to see Oriental culture as static in both time and place, as “eternal, uniform, and incapable of defining itself.” This gave Europe a sense of its own cultural and intellectual superiority. The West consequently saw itself as a dynamic, innovative, expanding culture, as well as “the spectator, the judge and jury of every facet of Oriental behavior.” This became part of its imperial conceit.
3) Thirdly, Said argues that Orientalism has produced a false description of Asians and the Oriental cultures. This happened primarily because of the essentialist nature of the enterprise that is, the belief that it was possible to define the essential qualities of Asians and Oriental culture. These qualities were seen in uniformly negative terms, he says. The Orient was defined as a place isolated from the mainstream of human progress in the sciences, arts, and commerce. Hence: its sensuality, its tendency to despotism, its aberrant mentality, its habit of inaccuracy, its backwardness.
