In 1978, Columbia Professor Edward Said wrote his book Orientalism in which he c
ID: 3500624 • Letter: I
Question
In 1978, Columbia Professor Edward Said wrote his book Orientalism in which he critiqued the broad field of scholarship known as orientalism.
According to Said, what are the key attributes of 'orientalism?' In other words, what kinds of assumptions did the orientalists make about the so-called 'orient' and the so-called 'orientals' (and implicitly about the so-called 'occident' and so-called 'occidentals')? Are these assumptions just intellectual ideas, confined to individuals' brains, or are they connected to the physical world and real relations between groups of people?
Explanation / Answer
Orientalism is defined as the sometimes-biased perspective through which Westerners view languages, lifestyles, art, cultures, values and sciences of the East, notably the Middle East and North Africa. The term is especially used to describe the attitudes of 19th-century intellectuals who depicted their travels to these regions in art and literature, particularly works by French and British writers and artists. Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said's 1978 book “Orientalism” served as a critique for these attitudes by basically defining Orientalism as latent, manifest or contemporary. According to Edward Said, latent Orientialism refers to cultural differences that are neither seen nor easily identified by Western attitudes, such as manners of speaking and thought, which were primarily responsible for creating early stereotypical views of the East among Westerners. Manifest Orientalism, according to Said, deals with the obvious visible features of Eastern culture such as clothing, architecture and art those things that can be seen by the West and therefore easily interpreted to mean “opposing Western culture.” In "Orientalism," Edward Said describes current Western stereotyping of Arabs as “irrational, menacing, untrustworthy, anti-Western, dishonest, and perhaps most importantly prototypical.” One of the key Orientalism characteristics are the European textual representations of the colonial Orient. The texts include novels, travel books, letters, manuscripts, documents, and various other textual remnants of material cultural. These texts were based on the assumptions that Europeans had drawn about the Eastern culture. In addition to the Western assumptions, there is a distinct absence of what the actual inhabitants had to say. Thus, these textual discourses allowed a retrospective view of the political, social and cultural relationships and situations that existed in the post-colonial era. In the first characteristic of Orientalism wherein the term occident is used to define the Western culture. Said argues that there existed a negative inversion between the two concepts where the "Orient" is characterized as opposite of the "good western culture". Thus, there is a formation of a myth wherein the prototypical "Orient" is viewed as eccentric, backward, sensual, and passive. Its progress in comparison with the Occidental culture was always inferior and conquerable. On one hand, Said argued that Orientalism is a misrepresentation of the ‘real’ Orient, in which case Orientalism is a type of ideological knowledge in a Marxian sense. On the other, Said followed the logic of discourse theory in implying that no ‘real’ Orient exists, and is solely a Western construct, an imaginative geography. Due to time limit,any remaining questions can be asked as another question,they will be answered,thankyou for your cooperation