ROLL NO. : 31
STD: M.A. (SEM-3)
SUB: The Postcolonial Literature
PAPER NO. : 11
TOPIC:Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism’ is an elaborate
exercise in examining the postcolonial world.
SUBMITTED TO: DEPT OF ENGLISH M.K BHAVNAGAR UNIVERSITY
Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism’ is an elaborate
exercise in examining the postcolonial world.
“No one today is purely one thing.
Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are not more that starting
points, which it followed into actual experience for only a moment are quickly
left behind. Imperialism consolidated the mixture of culture and identities on
a glob scale. But its worst and most paradoxical gift was to allow people to
believe that they were only, mainly, exclusively, white, or Black, or Western,
or Oriental. Yet just as human make their own history, they also makes their
cultures and ethnic identities. No one can deny the persisting continuities of
long traditions, and sustained habitations, national languages and cultural geographies,
but there seems no reason except fear and prejudice to keep insisting on their
separation and distinctiveness, as if that was all human life was about.
Survival in fact is about the connections between things, in Eliot’s phrase,
reality cannot be deprived of the ‘other echoes (that) inhabit the garden.’ It
is more rewarding and more difficult to think concretely and sympathetically,
contrapuntally, about others than only about ‘us.’ But this also means not
trying to rule others, not trying to classify them or put them in hierarchies,
above all, not constantly reiterating how ‘our’ culture or country is number
one.”
Orientalism is a term used by art historian
and literary and cultural studies scholars for the imitation or depiction of
aspects of Middle Eastern and East Asian cultures by writer’s designer and
artists from the west. Since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in
1978 much academic discourse has begun to use the term “Orientalism” to refer
to a general patronizing Western attitude towards Middle Eastern, Asian and
North African societies.
Edward Said:
Edward Wadie said (1935-2003) was from Jerusalem, Palestine. He was
a literary theorist. He became professor in 1991. As a cultural critic, Said is
best known for the 1978 book- “Orientalism”, “O” is based upon Said’s knowledge
of colonial literature, literary theory and post structuralism. In Said’s
analysis, the West essentializes these societies as static and undeveloped-
thereby fabricating a view of Oriental culture that can be studied, depicted,
and reproduced. Implicit in this fabrication writes Said, is the idea that
Western society, is fully developed, flexible and for superior.
Meaning:
Orientalism” refers to the “Orient” or “East” in contrast to the
“Occident” or West”, and often, as seen by the West Orient came into English
from Middle French orient. Orients have related meanings:
ü The Eastern part of the world
ü The part of sky in which the sun rises
ü The rising Sun
ü Daybreak
ü Dawn
“Orientalism” is widely used in art to refer the works of the many
western 19th century artists, who specialized in “Oriental”
subjects, often drawing on their travels to Western Asia. In 1978, the
Palestinian- American scholar Edward said published his influential but
controversial book. He used the term “Orientalism” to described what he argue
was a pervasive Western tradition, both academic and artistic of the East,
shaped by the imperialists in the 18th and 19th
centuries. Edward Said’s book became one of the basic tests of post colonialism
or post-colonial studies.
“You cannot continue to victimize someone else just because
you yourself were a victim once- there has to be a limit.”
Post
colonialism:
Post colonialism deals with conflicts of identity and cultural
belonging. Post colonialism or Post-colonial studies is an academic discipline
featuring methods of intellectual discourse that cultural legacies of
colonialism and imperialism a country and establishing settlers for the
economic exploitation of the native people and their lands. as anthropology,
post colonialism records human relation among the colonial nations and the
subaltern people exploited by colonial rule.
Definition:
As an epistemology as an ethics, and as a politics, the field of
post colonialism addresses the politics of knowledge- the matters that
constitute the post-colonial identity of decolonised people. In post-colonial
literature, the anti-conquest narrative analyses the identity politics that are
the social and cultural perspectives of the subaltern colonial subjects- their
creative resistance to the culture of the coloniser.
A major aspect of post colonialism is the rather violent- like,
unbuffered contact or clash of cultures as an inevitable result of former
colonial times, the relationship of the colonial power to the colonised
country, its population and culture and vice- versa seems extremely ambiguous
and contradictory.
“Consider that in
1800 Western powers claimed 55 present but actually held approximately 35
present of the earth’s surface, and that by 1874 the proportion was 67%, a rate
of increase of 83,000 square mile per. By 1914, the annual rate had risen to an
astonishing 240,000 square mile per year, and Europe held a grand total of
roughly 85% of the earth as colonies, protectorates, dependencies, dominions,
and commonwealths. No other associated set of colonies in history was as large;
none so totally dominated any so unequal in power to the Western
metropolis.” - ‘Culture and Imperialism’
Edward Said’s evaluation and critique of the sets of beliefs known as
Orientalismforms as important background for post-colonial studies. His works
deals with the inaccuracies of questions various paradigms of thought which are
accepted on individual, academic and political levels.
The Orient:
This word signifies a system of representations framed by political
forces that brought the Orient into western learning, Western consciousness,
and western empire. Orient is a major image of what is inferior and alien
(‘other’) to the West.
Orientalism is a manner
of regularized writing, vision, and study, dominated by imperatives,
perspectives, and ideological biases ostensibly suited to the Orient. It is the
image of the ‘Orient’ expressed as an entire system of thought and scholarship.
The Oriental
is the person represented by such thinking. The man is depicted as feminine,
weak, yet strangely dangerous because his sexuality poses a threat to white,
Western woman. The Oriental is a single image, a sweeping generalization, and a
stereotype that crosses countless cultural and national boundaries.
Contemporary
Orientalism:
According to Edward Said Orientalism can be found in current Western
depictions of found in current Western depictions of “Arab” cultures. The
depictions of “the Arab cultures.” The Depictions of “the Arab” as irrational,
meaning, untrustworthy, anti- Western, dishonest, and perhaps most importantly
prototypical are ideas into which Orientalist scholarship has evolved.
The hold these
instruments have on mind is increased by the institutions built around them.
For every orientalist, quite literally, there is a support system of staggering
power, considering the ephemerality of the myths that Orientalism propagates.
The system now culminates onto the very institution of the state write about
the Arab Oriental world, therefore, is to write with the authority of a nation
and not with the affirmation of a strident ideology but with the unquestioning
certainty of absolute truth backed by absolute force.”
-
by Edward said
- According to Said “The Orient”
cannot be studied in a non- Orientalist manner, rather the scholar is obliged
to study more focused and smaller culturally consistent regions. The person who
has until now been known as “the Orient” most be given a voice
.
-
As a public
intellectual, said discussed culture, literature, music and contemporary
politics. During from his own experiences as Palestinian Christians in the
Middle East around the time Israel was established in 1948, Said argued for the
establishment of a Palestinian state. Also he was an advocate for equal
political and human rights for Palestinians in Israel and urged the U. S. to
pressure Israel to grant and respect these rights.
“The
Orient and Islam have a kind of extra real, phenomenologically reduced status
that puts them out of rich of everyone except the Western expert. From the
beginning of Western speculation about the orient, the one thing that orient,
the one thing that Orient was credible only after it had passed through and
been made firm by the refining fire of the Orientalists work.”
A very large mass of writers, among whom are poets, novelists,
philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators,
have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point
for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political
accounts. While discussing Orientalism the writer has discussed many writers and
their works dealing with Orient or Occident directly or indirectly.
“We cannot fight for our rights and our history as
well as future until we are armed with weapons of criticism and dedicated
consciousness”.
“When Disraeli said in his novel ‘Tancred’ that the
East was a career, he meant that to be interested in the East was something
bright young Westerns would find to be all consuming passion, he should not be
interpreted as saying that the East was ‘only’ a career for Westerners. There were
and are cultures and nations whose locations is in the East, and their lives, histories,
and customs have a brute reality obviously greater than anything that could be
said about them in the West. Above that fact this study of Orientalism has very
little to contribute, except to acknowledge it tacitly.”
Above paragraph talks about
Disraeli’s work which dealing with prejudice. Edward Said further mentions
Orientalized. He talks of K. M. Panikkar’s classic Asia and Western Dominance.
“To believe that
the orient was created- or, as I call it, ‘Orientalism’ and to believe that
such things happen simply as a necessity of the imagination, is a relationship
of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony, and is quite
accurately indicated in the title of K.M. Panikkar’s classic ‘Asia and Western
Dominance’.”
Said also writes about Victorian specialist who had definite views on
race and imperialism-
“Nearly every 19th
century writer was extraordinarily well aware of the fact of empire: this is a
subject not very well studied, but it will not take a modern Victorian
specialist long to admit that liberal cultural heroes like John Stuart Mill,
Arnold, Carlyle, Newman, Macaulay, Ruskin, George, Eliot and even Dickens had
definite views on race and imperialism, which are quite easily to be found at
work in their writing.”
He also refers
to the writers like Mill and Marx. He also writes about the works and views of
Gramsci, Lane, Renan or Flaubert while discussing Orientalism. The writer
mentions about the richness of native literature of Arabia, India, Japan,
Syria, Persia, Egypt, China, Germany, Italy, and Russia etc.
“…, a large part
of the Orient seemed to have been eliminated- India, Japan, China, and other
sections of the far East- not because these regions were not important but
because one could discuss Europe’s experience of the Near Orient, or of Islam,
apart from Orient...”
Edward Said examined many authors all
over the world. He discusses various works of art by them. He skilfully tried
to differentiate “Orient” and “Occident” and showed the richness of the
literature of the Post-colonial world. Hence, we can assertively say that
Edward Said’s “Orientalism” is an elaborate exercise in examining the
post-colonial world.
nice work. it is good to mentioned over all ideas of orientalism.
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