Assignment

on
Edward Said’s “Knowing the Oriental”
(from Orientalism 1978)
Question: - Discuss how the West has orientalized the East.

NAME: - A BIJIT SARKAR

CLASS: - M.A. ENGLISH (IV SEMESTER)
ROLL NUMBER: - 18MAENGTUR10
PAPER: - ENG-C404 – CONTEMPORARY THEORY

SUBMITTED TO: - D R. DWIJEN SHARMA

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
NEHU, TURA CAMPUS

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“In the field of Cultural Studies, [Edward] Said is our most vivacious narrator of
the history of European humanism’s complicity in the history of European
colonialism.”
̶ Aijaz Ahmad

“Orientalism, Said’s best known book, was published in 1978. It attempted to

explain the ways and means that the West had adopted to understand and to
represent the Orient at a discursive level.”
̶̶ Bharat Bhusan Mohanty’s
“Edward W. Said’s Orientalism: A Critique”

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 Edward Said is one of the most widely known, and controversial, intellectuals in the
world today. He was that rare breed of academic critic who was also a vocal public intellectual,
having done more than any other person to place the plight of Palestine before a world
audience. His importance as a cultural theorist has been established in two areas: his
foundational place in the growing school of postcolonial studies, particularly through his book
“Orientalism”; and his insistence on the importance of the ‘worldliness’ or material contexts of
the text and the critic.
Said’s publication of “Orientalism” (1978) made such an impact on thinking about
colonial discourse that for two decades it has continued to be the site of controversy, adulation
and criticism. Said’s intervention is designed to illustrate the manner in which the
representation of Europe’s ‘others’ has been institutionalized since at least the eighteenth
century as a feature of its cultural dominance.
Orientalism describes the various disciplines, institutions, processes of investigation and
styles of thought by which Europeans or the West came to ‘know’ the ‘Orient’ over several
centuries and thereby, as Said call it, ‘orientalized’ the East, and which reached their height
during the rise and consolidation of nineteenth-century imperialism.
The key to Said’s interest in this way of knowing Europe’s ‘others’ is that it effectively
demonstrates the link between knowledge and power, for it ‘constructs’ and dominates
Orientals in the process of knowing them.
The term ‘Orientalism’ is derived from ‘Orientalist’, which has been associated
traditionally with those engaged in the study of the Orient. The very term ‘the Orient’ holds
different meanings for different people. As Said points out, Americans associate it with the Far
East, mainly Japan and China, while for Western Europeans, and in particular the British and the
French, it conjures up different images. It is not only adjacent to Europe, as Said points out; ‘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’.
Part of the pervasive power of Orientalism is that it refers to at least three different
pursuits, all of which are interdependent: an academic discipline, a style of thought and a
corporate institution for dealing with the Orient. As an academic discipline, Orientalism
emerged in the late eighteenth century and has since assembled an archive of knowledge that
has served to perpetuate and reinforce Western representations of it. Orientalism is ‘the
discipline by which the Orient was (and is) approached systematically, as a topic of learning,
discovery and practice’. As a style of thought it is ‘based upon an ontological and
epistemological distinction’ between the Orient and the Occident. This definition is more
expansive and can accommodate as diverse a group of writers as classical Greek playwright
Aeschylus (524–455 BC), medieval Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265–1335), French novelist

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Victor Hugo (1802–85) and German social scientist and revolutionary Karl Marx (1818–83).The
third definition of Orientalism as a corporate institution is demonstrative of its amorphous
capacity as a structure used to dominate and authorize the Orient. Hence, Orientalism
necessarily is viewed as being linked inextricably to colonialism.
These three definitions as expounded by Said illustrate how Orientalism is a complex
web of representations about the Orient. The first two definitions embody the textual creation
of the Orient while the latter definition illustrates how Orientalism has been deployed to
execute authority and domination over the Orient. The three are interrelated, particularly since
the domination entailed in the third definition is reliant upon and justified by the textual
establishment of the Orient that emerges out of the academic and imaginative definitions of
Orientalism.
The core of Said’s argument about how the West has orientalized the East, resides in the
link between knowledge and power, which is amply demonstrated by Prime Minister Arthur
Balfour’s defense of Britain’s occupation of Egypt in 1910, when he declared that: ‘We know
the civilization of Egypt better than we know any other country’. Knowledge for Balfour meant
not only surveying a civilization from its origins, but being able to do that. ‘To have such
knowledge of such a thing [as Egypt] is to dominate it, to have authority over it…since we know
it and it exists, in a sense, as we know it’. The premises of Balfour’s speech demonstrate very
clearly how knowledge and dominance go hand in hand:
“England knows Egypt; Egypt is what England knows; England knows that Egypt cannot have
self-government; England confirms that by occupying Egypt; for the Egyptians, Egypt is what England
has occupied and now governs; foreign occupation therefore becomes ‘the very basis’ of contemporary
Egyptian civilization.”
But to see Orientalism as simply a rationalisation of colonial rule is to ignore the fact
that colonialism was justified in advance by Orientalism. The division of the world into East and
West had been centuries in the making and expressed the fundamental binary division on
which all dealing with the Orient was based. But one side had the power to determine what the
reality of both East and West might be. Knowledge of the Orient, because it was generated out
of this cultural strength, ‘in a sense creates the Orient, the Oriental and his world’. With this
assertion we come right to the heart of Orientalism, and consequently to the source of much of
the controversy it has provoked. To Said, the Orient and the Oriental are direct constructions of
the various disciplines by which they are known by Europeans. This appears, on the one hand,
to narrow down an extremely complex European phenomenon to a simple question of power
and imperial relations, but, on the other, to provide no room for Oriental self representations.
Said points out that the upsurge in Orientalist study coincided with the period of
unparalleled European expansion: from 1815 to 1914. His emphasis on its political nature can
be seen in his focus on the beginnings of modern Orientalism: not with William Jones’s
disruption of linguistic orthodoxy, but in the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt in 1798, ‘which was

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in many ways the very model of a truly scientific appropriation of one culture by another,
apparently stronger one’. But the crucial fact was that Orientalism, in all its many tributaries,
began to impose limits upon thought about the Orient. Even powerful imaginative writers such
as Gustav Flaubert, Gerard de Nerval or Sir Walter Scott were constrained in what they could
either experience or say about the Orient. For ‘Orientalism was ultimately a political vision of
reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, “us”)
and the strange (Orient, the East, “them”)’. It worked this way because the intellectual
accomplishments of Orientalist discourse served the interests, and were managed by the vast
hierarchical web, of imperial power.
To be brief, Orientalism, then, is a complex web of Western representations of the
Orient. Said reiterates his main argument that the "Orient was created –or, rather as I call it
orientalized" by a hegemonic process that robbed it of its true identity, voice, and indigenous
culture. This imagined reality was substituted with pictures, perceptions, and perspectives
derived from what we may call the "Western gaze' or a hegemonic Eurocentric perspective.
This Western gaze, not unlike the deadly "male gaze" in feminist theory, subjectifies and
objectifies all that it sees in its own image, through its own colored lenses, and from its own
position of power. As Said says, "The main thing for a European visitor was a European
representation of the Orient". Indeed, Orientalism views the Orient through its own vested
interests, from its own vantage point, with an imperial Eurocentric perspective. In a sharp and
penetrating critique of the systemic and systematic objectification of the Orient by the
Occident, Said states:
“Under the general heading of knowledge of the Orient, and within the umbrella of Western
hegemony over the Orient during the period from the end of the eighteenth century, there emerged a
complex Orient suitable for study in the academy, for display in the museum, for reconstruction in the
colonial office, for theoretical illustration in anthropological, biological, linguistic, racial, and historical
theses about mankind and the universe, for instances of economic and sociological theories of
development, revolution, cultural personality, national or religious character.”
These are the various means and ways of the making of Europe’s ‘Others’ - of
Orientalizing the Orient. These forms of objectification address every aspect of its character,
from governance to development, from academic study to culture, religion and identity
formation. Said’s “Orientalism” has established him as a leading theorist of the present age and
as a leading scholar of postcolonialism.

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Thank You!

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