Edward Said’s Orientalism is a book that challenges how people have thought about the East and West for centuries, especially regarding how the East has been defined in Orientalism. So, what does Orientalism mean? According to Said, it is a way of understanding the Eastern world based on its unique role in Western Europe’s experience. The East is not just close to Europe; it is also the most important and prosperous European colony.
The East is the source of civilization, language, and cultural rivalry. It is also one of the most potent and frequent images of the “other world” in European eyes. The East helped define the West by representing everything opposite to it. However, instead of being some fantasy, the East is a fundamental part of European civilization and material culture.
As a way of talking about culture and institutions, Orientalism expresses and shows these aspects of a culture, backing it up with colonial-era systems and bureaucracy.
Said argues that Orientalism is a style of discourse that sets up a relationship between the East (the Orient) and, almost always, the West (the Occident). The Western view of the East, which is so different from how the East sees itself, led many Western scholars, philosophers, and writers to write about the East, creating theories and stories about it.
In Orientalism, Said examines the ideas of Western scholars and writers who have written about the East from an Orientalist perspective. He also argues from the point of view of Eastern scholars, like himself, who reject being defined by European scholars, whom he calls orientalists.
Said uses different forms of the word “Orient,” which means East, the direction where the sun rises. The term “Orient” refers to places like the Middle East, Asia, and the Far East—territories that were once part of a European empire. He uses “Orient” to talk about a way of representing the East framed by political forces that brought the East into Western empires, Western learning, and Western consciousness.
The West uses this term to describe the East. He also clarifies that he is not trying to cover everything but focuses on how American and British scholars have approached Arab societies in the Middle East and North Africa. In his book’s introduction, Said explains the different purposes of Orientalism. According to him, Orientalism is a way of thinking based on the differences between East and West.
Second, Orientalism is academic research that includes everyone who teaches, studies, and writes about the East. Lastly, Orientalism is an institution that handles the East. It is the Western way of dominating and reshaping the East. In other words, the Middle East is stuck and cannot define itself. However, the West took control through Orientalism and portrayed the East as something to be exploited.
Orientalism aims to dominate the East and remove its ability to speak for itself.
The first chapter covers a wide range of subjects regarding history and periods. It also examines political and philosophical themes beyond that. Said discusses pre-18th-century writings on the Muslim Near East and the socio-political impact of Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt. According to him, the West sees the East as a world of texts.
European Orientalists were more interested in the classical period than contemporary Eastern culture. He also discusses how Orientalists read the East through Western Christian moral values. For example, in Dante’s Divine Comedy, Muhammad is described as being in a dark trench of hell with the disobedient people.
From an Orientalist view, a middle-class white Westerner feels that the East is a place that is naturally governed by the West, seeing it as a kind of minority dominance.
In the second chapter, Said begins to trace the development of modern Orientalism by giving a broad chronological overview. He also tries to trace it by describing tools that famous artists and scholars commonly use. He gives an overview of the French and British traditions of studying the Near East Muslim world during the 19th century and beyond, up to World War I.
For other purposes, the main focus is on the works of French and British Orientalists. He shows how Orientalism has shaped Western views of the Arab Middle East and how the Middle East views itself. European writers in the East had strange lives, and the East was seen as a place of ancient, unimaginable things. The East was a place full of untapped potential.
In the third chapter, Said explains latent Orientalism. The “latent East” is a term that refers to the East, which is not real but represents the idea of the East. With this understanding, Orientalism is not just some optimistic view of the East that is always present in the West. It is also a strong academic tradition. Orientalism is an area of interest for tourists, trading companies, governments, military expeditions, nature enthusiasts, and shrine visitors who see the East as a specific geography, people, and civilization.
For 9th-century European Orientalists, the East was like a system of truth. So, Europeans who understood the East were also racists and imperialists. Orientalists’ academic study of the East has resulted in thousands of pages showing the huge degree of interaction with the East. However, if we look at the movement of people from the East to the West simultaneously, it is out of balance.
Most critics and others get that people often find Orientalism dangerous, both in the East and the West, especially those who have not studied the discourse or read the book. However, it is selfish to think Orientalism is the most challenging book ever. People like Edward Said seem experienced, whether in the social sciences, post-structuralism or what eventually became postcolonial studies. Those who follow Said are pretty independent in what they say.
Even without much detail, the book resonates with many readers and audiences. Said’s way of simplifying Western scholars ties into his misuse of Antonio Gramsci’s idea of hegemony in a unique way. For Gramsci, hegemony is not just control over another group, like domination. It results from a complex interaction between different forces and groups of people.
That is why Gramsci focuses on how counter-hegemony has worked throughout history.
Gramsci’s analysis offers much insight into studying counter-hegemonic forces as independent agents, looking at their roles, positions, and cultures. However, by ignoring how Western hegemony is constructed, Said makes a non-critical assumption about Western civilization and places it in the writings of scholars over time. So, it ends up becoming this Western idea of world domination.
The world community is learning to live in harmony. They do not see their race or themselves as better than other nations. Anyway, the heart of Orientalism is the discourse that shapes the rhetoric of the East and the West. It is an important book for deconstructing European scholars’ views of the East. For centuries, Said worked to break down that one-sided representation from the European point of view.
Orientalism comes from the need for the West to define itself against something else. Europe found that something else in the East, especially through the Crusades. The West saw itself in a position of political and military power, and it used that power to conquer what it saw as the East. As the tradition of Western superiority and Eastern views of stasis grew, that tradition became more solidified.
It is almost impossible for any scholar to break free from this practice. What people need is for each community to speak for itself. It is about political knowledge and creating a discourse around their identity.
References
- Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The Location of Culture. Routledge.
- Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Q. Hoare & G. Nowell-Smith, Eds.). International Publishers.
- Hall, S. (1997). Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. Sage Publications.
- Said, E. W. (1978). Orientalism. Pantheon Books.
- Said, E. W. (1989). Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures. Pantheon Books.
- Said, E. W. (1993). Culture and Imperialism. Vintage Books.
- Said, E. W. (2000). The Edward Said Reader. Vintage Books.
- Young, R. (2001). Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Blackwell Publishing.