E-E-305 Post Colonial Literature

Assignment Paper: - E-E-305 Post Colonial Literature

Topic                     : - Introduction to “Orientalism”

Student’s name     : - Makwana Jayshri D.

Roll  no                 :- 14

URL                      :-makwanajayshri261011.blogspot.com

Semester               :- 3

Batch                    :- 2010-11

                                                 

                                   Submitted to,

                                                 Dr. Dilip Barad

                                                 Department of English

                                                 Bhavnagar University.

 

Introduction:-   

                       A central idea of Orientalism is that Western knowledge about the East is not generated from facts or reality, but from preconceived archetypes that envision all "Eastern" societies as fundamentally similar to one another, and fundamentally dissimilar to "Western" societies. This discourse establishes "the East" as antithetical to "the West". Such Eastern knowledge is constructed with literary texts and historical records that often are of limited understanding of the facts of life in the Middle East. Orientalism by Edward Said is a canonical text of cultural studies in which he has challenged the concept of orientalism or the difference between east and west, as he puts it. He says that with the start of European colonization the Europeans came in contact with the lesser developed countries of the east. They found their civilization and culture very exotic, and established the science of orientalism, which was the study of the Orientals or the people from these exotic civilizations. Edward Said argues that the Europeans divided the world into two parts; the east and the west or the occident and the orient or the civilized and the uncivilized. This was totally an artificial boundary; and it was laid on the basis of the concept of them and us or theirs and ours. “Oriental” was simply understood as the opposite of “occidental” (western). The word was used to develop negative connotations after the publication of the work Orientalism by the American-Palestinian scholar Edward Said. Following the ideas of Michel Foucault, Said emphasized the relationship between power and knowledge in scholarly and popular thinking. In particular, Said says that without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period (p. 3).

In the part I of his introduction, Said puts several definitions of “Orientalism”. Some of these are:

       “A way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on Orient’s special place in European Western experience” (p. 1).

       “A style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident’” (p. 2).

       More historically and materially defined, Orientalism is “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (p. 3). Said gives limitation in his work, that Orientalism derives from a particular closeness experienced between Britain and France and the Orient, which until the early years of the nineteenth century had really meant only India and the Bible lands. America also has dominated the Orient since World War II. British, French, or American come the large body of texts Said calls Orientalist (p. 4).

In part II, In this chapter, Edward Said explains how the science of orientalism developed and how the orientals started considering the Orientals as non-human beings. The Orientals divided the world in to two parts by using the concept of ours and theirs. An imaginary geographical line was drawn between what was ours and what was theirs. The orients were regarded as uncivilized people; and the westerns said that since they were the refined race it was their duty to civilize these people and in order to achieve their goal, they had to colonize and rule the orients. They said that the orients themselves were incapable of running their own government. The Europeans also thought that they had the right to represent the orientals in the west all by themselves. The most important use of orientalism to the Europeans was that they defined themselves by defining the orientals. For example, qualities such as lazy, irrational, uncivilized, crudeness were related to the orientals, and automatically the Europeans became active, rational, civilized, sophisticated. Thus, in order to achieve this goal, it was very necessary for the orientalists to generalize the culture of the orients.   

Said stresses particularly on the Orient as an idea that has history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West. Then, he gives three qualifications to someone who deals with Orientalism.

First of all, it would be wrong to conclude that the Orient was essentially an idea, or a creation with no corresponding reality. The phenomenon of Orientalism deals principally with the internal consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient beyond any correspondence with a real Orient (p. 5).

Second, the ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be understood without their force or their configuration of power. The relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, and of varying degrees of a complex hegemony (p. 5).

Third, one has never to assume that the structure of Orientalism is nothing more that a structure of lies or myths which would simply blow away. It is particularly valuable as a sign of European-Atlantic power over the Orient than it is as a verdict discourse about the Orient (p. 6).

Another justification the Europeans gave to their colonization was that they were meant to rule the Orientals since they have developed sooner than the Orientals as a nation, which shows that they were biologically superior, and secondly it were the Europeans who discovered the orients not the orients who discovered the Europeans. Darwin’s theories were put forward to justify their superiority, biologically by the Europeans. In this chapter, Edward Said also explains how the two most renowned orientalists of the 19^th century, namely Silvestre de Sacy and Ernest Renan worked and gave orientalism a new dimension. In fact, Edward Said compliments the contribution made by Sacy in the field. He says that Sacy organized the whole thing by arranging the information in such a way that it was also useful for the future orientalists. And secondly, the prejudice that was inherited by every orientalist was considerably low in him. On the other hand, Renan who took advantage of Sacy’s work was as biased as any previous orientalists. He believed that the science of orientalism and the science of philology have a very important relation; and after Renan this idea was given a lot attention and many future orientalists worked of in its line.

In the part III, avoiding from an inaccuracy produced by too dogmatic generality as well as too positivistic focus, Said deals with three main aspects of his contemporary reality to point the way out of the methodological difficulties as the followings:

1.     The distinction between pure and political knowledge.  Most knowledge produced in the contemporary West is that it be non-political, scholarly, academic, impartial, or small minded doctrinal belief. However, in practice, the reality is more problematic since no one has ever devised a method for detaching the scholar for the circumstance of life, from the fact of his involvement with a class, a set of belief, or a social position. Therefore, Orientalism is not merely political subject, nor a large collection of texts about the Orient, nor representative of some nefarious “Western” imperialist plot to hold down the “Oriental” world. It is a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts. It is an elaboration of a basic geographical distinction and a whole series of interests as scholarly discovery. It is a discourse corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power (p.12) 

2. The methodological question.

                     Much of what Said does in his study is to describe both the historical authority in and the personal authorities of Orientalism. His principal methodological devises for studying authority are what can be called strategic location, a way of describing the author’s position in text regard to the Oriental materials he writes about, and strategic formation, a way of analyzing the relationship between texts and a way in which groups, types, genres of texts acquire mass and referential power among themselves.

3. The personal dimension. 

                      Much of the personal investment of this study derives from Said’s awareness of being an “Oriental” as a child growing up in two British colonies. All of his education in Palestine and Egypt, and in the United States has been Western and that deep early awareness persisted.