Crisis in Orientalism

Crisis in Orientalism

INTRODUCTION:

Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) is a well known and most debated work. It belongs to trilogy of which the other two The Question of Palestine (1980) and Covering Islam (1982), from a series of writing dealing principally with the Israeli- Palestinian conflict. Orientalism is one of the most influential text of the twentieth century. Spivak calls it a source book through which marginality itself has acquired the status of a discipline in the Anglo- American academy. Orientalism occupies three overlapping domains. It designates first the 4000 – year history of and cultural relations between Europe and Asia; second the scientific discipline producing specialists in Oriental languages and culture from the early nineteenth century; and third the long- term images, stereotypes and general ideology about ‘the orient’ as ‘the other’, constructed by generations of Western scholars. ‘Orientalism’ depends on a culturally constructed distinctions between ‘the Occident’ and ‘the Orient’ (a fact less than of nature than of ‘imaginative geography’, as said terms it) and is inescapably political, as is its study.

            In Edward Said’s view ‘representations’ is a key factor in Orientalism that the West has created. It makes imagination as a powerful force that transforms the Orient into an image that suits the Western imperialist agenda. The best definition of orientalism comes from Said himself:

            A way of coming to terms with the orient’s special places in European Western experience, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the west) as contrasting image, idea, personality, experience Orientalism is a style of thought based upon ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the orient” and “ the Occident”(Said, 32)

            Said sees representation in Orientalism at three different levels (a) linkage with the objective knowledge; (b) its relationship with the political will of the jest to dominate over others (c) representations as tool of power.

            In“ Crisis in Orientalism” Edward W. Said exposes the limitations of Orientalism. He continues to focus our attention to the enterprise of falsification of the East by the Western Orientalists. Almost the entire West came to believe in the strange portrayals of Arab land and its people, filling the text that came to be written in large numbers. In this enterprise joined people from such diverse areas as creative writing, economics, liberal, philosophy, political thought, administration, history, humanities of different hues. In this particular essay the author deals at lengths with the treatment of the Arabs and Islam by the West which we find no different from their treatment in other works of India and the Hindu as backward, superstitious and blockheads. One has to read such works as Jutes Verne’s, Round the World in Eighty Days(1873) and Kipling’s Kim (1901) and other Raj novels, diaries and personal accounts written during the heyday of colonialism.

            Said, here borrows from Foucault’s views that all texts are politically informed, more so colonial texts. Obviously, Orientalism owes a great debt to Foucault’s dual notion of ‘discourse’. Said regards Foucault’s presentations of order, stability, authority and regularity power of knowledge as the underpinning notion of all institutions of governance. Any speech, writing or belief through which the world can be known and understood. In the Foucauldian sense, ‘discourse’ contains statements which are governed by unspoken rules yielding a language of power co- ordinate through knowledge. We can say that there is no truth, and that all knowledge is a ‘will to power’. All societies, following Foucault, have procedures whereby the production of discourse is controlled selected, organized and redistributed and the purposes of these processes of discourse control is to ward off ‘danger’.

            In Orientalism, he shows how Western knowledge far from being academic, is tainted by power by power and political motivation. These conclusion are carried forward into Culture and Imperialism where the creative writers consciousness is seen to be shaped by the imperialist tendencies prevailing in the nineteenth century England.

            The so called Orientalists presented the East from their Western perspective. “ Orientalism is the discourse of the West about the East, a huge body of text- literary, topographical, anthropological, historical, sociological that has been accumulating since the renaissance” (David Lodge, 289). Said explains that certain texts are accorded:

            The authority of academics, institutions, and governments most important such texts can create not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe. In time such knowledge and reality produce a tradition, or what Michael Foucault calls a discourse, whose material presence or weight, pot the originality of a given author, is really responsible for the text produced out of it. (Said, 94). In this way, the orients ‘vacillates’ between the West’s contempt for what is familiar and it shivers with delight or fear of novelty.

            The West constructs the East in the terms of binary opposition. Said shows that this opposition is crucial to European self conception. As Loomba puts it:

If colonized people are irrational, Europeans are rational; if the former are barbaric, sensual and lazy, Europe is civilization itself, with its sexual appetites under control and its dominant ethic that of hard work; if the Orient is static, Europe can be seen as developing and marching ahead; the orient has to be feminine so that Europe can be masculine.(Loomba, 132)

            This dialectic between self and other, derived in part from deconstruction, has been hugely influential in subsequent studies of colonial discourses in other places. Since Orientalism, colonial discourse studies have analysed a wide range of cultural texts and practices such as art, works, scientific systems, museums, educational institutions, advertisements, pattern of clothing and ideas on beauty. “colonial discourse analysis forms the categories and assumptions”.( Young, 11)

           So the impressive knowledge Orientists filtered through their cultural bias, for the study of the Orient was not objective but A political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference Between the familiar (Europe, The West, ‘us’) and the strange (the Orient, the East, ‘them’) when one uses categories like Oriental and Western as both the starting and the end points of analysis, research Public policy, the result is usually to polarize the distinction the Oriental becomes more Oriental, the Westerner more Western and limit the human encounter between different cultures, traditions and societies. (Said, 45-46)

Said argued that knowledge of the East could never be innocent or objective because it was produced by human beings who are necessarily embedded in colonial history and relationship.

          Said suggests that we need a contrapuntal perspective in opposite order to think through and interpret together experienced that are discrepant, each with its own agenda, pace of development, internal formation and coherence- and a system of external relationships that coexist and interact with one another. Said is, thus, suggesting that we abandon a unified approach that goes by the master narrative, and adopt a technique where marginal and apparently contradictory narrative battle.

          In short, Orientalism is this production of ideas, knowledge, and opinions about the orient – ideas which were preliminary to governance, military conquest and political control over the geographical territory of the orient. Thus, Orientalism is a Western style for dominating restructuring and having authority over the orients.

REFERNCE:

1.        Gandhi, Leela. Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction. Oxford: OUP, 1998.2.        Lodge, David. Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. Singapore: Pearson Education Pvt. Ltd., 2004.3.        Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Post Colonialism. New York: Routledge, 2005.4.        Nayar, Parmod K. Postcolonial literature: An Introduction. New Delhi: Pearson Longman, 2008.5.        Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New  York : Vintage Books, 1978.6.        Young, R. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. London: Routledge, 1990.

Content: Ritu Rani

           Research Scholar, English Department, Kurukshetra University, Kurukshetra