I wrote this paper for my intro to comp lit class in october of 2023. It looks at the introduction chapter of Edward Said's Orientalism:
Edward Said’s Orientalism is a discussion of and meditation on exactly that, Orientalism. The ‘Introduction’ chapter serves to define the term Orientalism as well as divulge the methods and ways of thinking Said employs to create such definition. The Introduction of Said’s Orientalism works through the East-West binary by complicating this paradox with another assumed binary: the real and the imagined.
Said understands Orientalism as “a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident’” (2). Historically Orientalism has been defined as an academic discipline concerned with Oriental art, literature, and culture. Said’s language - “a style of thought” - suggests that while Orientalism may be academic, it is equally if not predominantly a social and cultural framework pervasive in the West. Said grounds this with his use of the words ontological, referring to the inherent nature of being prescribed to a concept or entity, and epistemological, relating to the methods in which knowledge is acquired and validated.
The ontological distinction that Said speaks of refers to the construction of the Orient/East and the Occident/West as fundamentally different. Orientalism understands the Occident as rational, progressive, and superior. The style of thinking associates the Orient with exocticism, backwardness, and inferiority. Orientalist ontology posits Europe as the self and the Orient as the other. Existentialist theory supposes that one comes to understand themself only through their gaze upon the other. In positioning the East as the other, the West has been able to construct an identity for itself. Because European culture and frameworks see the Orient as primitive and weak, it understands itself as strong, modern, and just.
Said explains that “because of Orientalism the Orient was not (and is not) a free subject of thought or action. This is not to say that Orientalism unilaterally determines what can be said about the Orient, but that it is the-whole network of interests inevitably brought to bear on (and therefore always involved) any occasion when that peculiar entity ‘the Orient’ is in question” (3). Whether it be colonialist or imperialist, Europe has historically had an interest in the Orient. The specific European interests always necessitated the show of Western power. Thus the easiest way to create such power was to position the Orient as weak and foolish. Said does not want to paint a picture that ignores the voice and agency of the East but rather illuminate the ways in which the self-determination of the Orient is ignored or forbidden by the colonialist/imperialist Western incentives that prop up Orientalism.
The ontological notion of the Occident as the rational self lends to the epistemological distinctions within Orientalism previously discussed by Said. The Orientalist epistemology suggests that sources and methods used to produce knowledge about the West are scientific and objective. Inversely, the Orientalist methods used to garner knowledge about the East are subjective and imaginative. Said suggests that Orientalism does not observe these differences but rather constructs and depends upon them.
Orientalism’s language of “a style of thought” and its discussion of the epistemological methods towards the East may misrepresent Orientalism as an imaginative product. It is true that the framework of the Occident permits writers to project their, often unfounded, imagined interpretations of the Orient as reality. Said writes, however, this process happens without consent “for example, in the fact that Flaubert’s encounter with an Egyptian courtesan produced a widely influential model of the Oriental woman; she never spoke of herself, she never represented her emotions, presence, or history. He spoke for and represented her. He was foreign, comparatively wealthy, male, and these were historical facts of domination that allowed him not only Kuchuk Hanem physically but to speak for her and tell his readers in what way she was ‘typically Oriental’” (6). The key thing here is Said’s inclusion of the word domination. Domination exists in the material rather than the imagined. It calls forth a real history of Western violent power over the East. While Orientalist texts might compose an imaginary truth, in reality they are bastions of Western domination over the Orient. The content of the aforementioned literatures are imagined by their individual authors, but the frameworks that the combined Orientalist literatures construct have had very real and experienced impacts on the Orient. Orientalist literature’s tendencies to represent without consent are to be seen as a counterpart to acts of the nonconsensual supremacy of the West.
In Orientalism’s Introduction Said examines how he might approach the construction of his definition of Orientalism. Historically as an academic discipline Orientalism has found its definition of the Orient in a process that derives the general from the singular. This epistemological method is unsound as the definitions of the Orient created by it are positivistic. Additionally, the method of deriving knowledge of the Orient that is particular and singular understands a sum of individual literatures as the informants and fabricators of hegemony. This method does not factor the relationship of power between the West and the East that has long existed as cultural hegemony. Said turns to speculate if a more general epistemological approach to the Orient would create a more accurate definition of the space. This general approach would solely investigate doctrines of Western supremacy. This too creates a dogmatic sort of definition of the Orient as approaching the aforementioned doctrines as truth reinforces stereotypes and hegemony, and approaching such doctrines as imagined erases the fact of the relationships between these two places. It is best to employ both the general and the particular perspectives together. For example, in Orientalism Said will often investigate the language of a piece of writing as the choices of an individual author. Subsequently, or sometimes simultaneously, he will investigate word choice as the product of the ways of thinking predominate in the author’s cultural-geographical context. This method teaches that individual Orientalist literatures are inseparable from the hegemony they were produced within as well as how those texts construct Western doctrines to perpetuate the hegemonic.
As Said thinks about the individual author and their work within and outside of their cultural context, he considers the notion of pure versus political knowledge. Orientalism is a discourse between literary, historical, philosophical, and academic texts. The book Orientalism looks to works from each of these fields to construct its beliefs about the framework. The Occident tends to view academic texts as the only literature with the ability to communicate nonpolitical, impartial, pure knowledge unaffected by any doctrine. Scholars working with Orientalism tend to turn to such texts to extract objective truth about the Orient. Said complicates this notion and practice saying “it is true that no production of knowledge in the human sciences can ever ignore or disclaim its author’s involvement as a human subject in his own circumstances” (11). If this is true of all scholarly articles, how might it play out with such works of Orientalism? When the Occident views a Western scholar’s work as pure knowledge the scholar’s epistemological methods are ignored. The Western scholar’s Orientalist epistemological methods inherently contain the scholar’s geopolitical identity and circumstances of reality. As the scholar becomes contextualized in geopolitics it becomes clear that their academic text is political rather than pure knowledge. The Western scholar garners and documents knowledge of the Orient “as a European or American first, as an individual second” (11). This scholar will never be able to construct knowledge or truth of the Orient without overt acknowledgement of the colonialist and imperialist incentives that construct their geopolitical identity. The material and historical impacts of Orientalism carry significantly more weight than an individual Western scholar’s relationship to the East carries. Thus, when a Western individual attempts to understand and/or convey something about the Orient they will almost always do so with and through a geopolitical identity that has been contrived to uphold Western supremacy, even if such a scholar’s personal identity does not support or desire to work with colonialist/imperialist frameworks, incentives, or histories. Orientalist scholarly texts will always be political because of the way they, whether intentional or unintentional, support hegemony and violence.
Said’s Introduction chapter in Orientalism asks its readers to reconsider the multifaceted nature of Orientalism. Said’s methods point towards an understanding of Orientalism that is not merely political or academic. Said first investigates literature to find that, despite the tradition of fictional and poetic writing being rooted in an author’s imagination, Orientalist literature is wielded as a tool of the West that has (and does) create a history of oppression of the East. Said next makes known how he combined perspectives that centralize the personal and the cultural to approach such literatures. Finally he places the individual within their context to illuminate the way in which one’s actions always carry impactful, political weight.
This chapter makes it clear that Orientalism is the “distribution of [skewed] geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts” to create interest in, support, and maintain the European and American material and intellectual domination over the East (12). Orientalism’s Introduction leaves readers with the conclusion that the only way to be rid of the East-West binary is to examine and subsequently implode hegemonic Orientalist frameworks.
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