from Beginnings: Intention and Method
PART II
Orientalism and After
4
Orientalism (1978)
No other book of Edward Said’s has enjoyed the attention of Orientalism. Since its publication in the United States in 1978, it has been translated into more than twenty-five languages with still more translations in progress. It has been the subject of countless conferences and impassioned debates. Perhaps more than any work of late twentieth-century criticism, it has transformed the study of literature and culture.
Yet for all of its success, Orientalism initially had difficulty finding a major publisher. Some publishing houses did not consider the book’s idea groundbreaking; still others were unwilling to back a book whose politics were at odds with the mainstream’s view of Palestinians, Arabs, and Israel. Of the few publishers that expressed an early interest in it, the University of California Press offered Said a paltry $250 advance for the book. Eventually, however, Pantheon, renowned for publishing the works of radical critics like Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, sent Orientalism to press in late 1977.
Orientalism’s impact surprised both publishers and even Said himself. For the topic of Orientalism— Europe’s representations of the East—was not totally new; other scholars had addressed the subject before. In 1953 Raymond Schwab wrote Le Renaissance orientale (a fastidiously detailed study of Europe’s nineteenth-century experience of the Orient); a decade later, Anwar Abdel Malek wrote an influential article “Orientalism in Crisis” (a Marxist interpretation of Europe’s representation of the “East”). In 1969 V. G. Kiernan wrote The Lords of the Human Kind (a history of European colonization).1
But Orientalism differed markedly from its predecessors. It brought together the philosophies of Michel Foucault and Antonio Gramsci to challenge the authority of Western knowledge of—and power over—the Orient. It examined an array of nineteenth-century French and British novelists, poets, politicians, philologists, historians, travelers, and imperial administrators: the voyages and travel narratives of nineteenth-century French authors such as Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Nerval, and Flaubert; the Indian journalism of Karl Marx; the writings of the first modern Orientalist Sylvestre de Sacy and of the French nineteenth-century philologist Ernest Renan; the adventure tales of Richard Burton and T. E. Lawrence; the speeches of Alfred Balfour; and the cables of British colonial governors in Egypt like Lord Cromer.
Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, Said viewed this ensemble of writing on the Orient as a discourse. Together the writings of Renan, Flaubert, T. E. Lawrence, and others composed a discipline by which European culture managed and produced the “Orient.” Their writings expressed “a will . . . not only to understand what [was] non-European, but also to control and manipulate what was manifestly different.”2
Yet if Foucault offered Said a means of describing the relationship between knowledge and power over the Orient, Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony provided a way of explaining how the influence of certain ideas about the “Orient” prevailed over others. The extensive influence of a particular idea, Gramsci argued, operated not through the brute application of force in nontotalitarian societies, but by consent—a tacit, unwritten agreement often passed off as conventional wisdom or common sense. Hegemony, Said explained, was how Orientalism could remain an indefatigable cultural and political force in the Western media’s representations of Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims.
Yet Gramsci’s writings suggested more to Said than the idea of hegemony; Gramsci offered him a way of conceptualizing his own predicament. The best and most effective critiques, wrote Gramsci, begin when writers understand themselves as products of the historical process, a process that leaves its traces without necessarily leaving an inventory of them.3 Orientalism was thus Said’s own account, his own inventory, of “the infinite traces” that decades of dispossession and exile inflicted on him and other “Oriental” subjects.
Among the traces deposited by the years of dispossession was Said’s experience of the June 1967 Arab-Israel War. As Said recounted in the documentary film In Search of Palestine (1998),4 the Arab defeat in 1967 had magnified his sense of national loss. Israel had come to occupy the West Bank and Gaza. In his early essay “The Arab Portrayed” (1968), written in the aftermath of the war, Said penned what later became the central theme of Orientalism:
If the Arab occupies space enough for attention, it is a negative value. He is seen as a disrupter of Israel’s and the West’s existence, or . . . as a surmountable obstacle to Israel’s creation in 1948. Palestine was imagined as an empty desert waiting to burst into bloom, its inhabitants inconsequential nomads possessing no stable claim to the land and therefore no cultural permanence.5
Orientalism was thus “a history of personal loss and national disintegration,” as he later wrote.6 Its aim was to “liberate intellectuals from the shackles of systems of thought like Orientalism.”7
The apprentices of modern-day Orientalism responded fiercely. Leon Wieseltier, ironically one of Said’s former students, wrote that Orientalism issued “little more than abject canards of Arab propaganda.”8 In a riposte published in The New York Review of Books, Bernard Lewis accused Said of “poisoning” the field of “Oriental” studies. Calling Said “reckless,” “arbitrary,” “insouciant,” and “outrageous,” Lewis recounted how Said, along with other Arab, Muslim, and Marxist critics, had “polluted” the word “Orientalism.” Said, Lewis argued, had attempted to denigrate the work of well-intentioned, disinterested Orientalists; he had politicized an innocent scholarship.9
Yet the shrill protests from Said’s critics revealed less about Said’s work than it did about their own hypocrisy. Veiled in language of “scholarship” and “objectivity,” their indignation was, as one reviewer put it, “an indication of the Orientalist attitudes that Said himself had described.”10 Lewis merely “delivered ahistorical and willful political assertions in the form of scholarly argument, a practice thoroughly in keeping with the least creditable aspects of old-fashioned colonialist Orientalism,” Said responded.11
International publishers soon took notice. Within two years of its publication and a year after its debut in England (1979), numerous translations began to appear. In 1980 Editions du Seuil published the French edition with a introduction by the French-Bulgarian literary critic Tzvetan Todorov. In the same year, Kamul Abu Deeb, the Syrian poet and critic, published an innovative translation in Arabic. Translations in German, Turkish, and Persian soon followed. The Spanish and Catalan editions were published in 1991. There were translations in Japanese and Swedish in 1993, as well as others in Serbo-Croatian, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Korean, Greek, and most recently Vietnamese and Hebrew.
Yet Orientalism’s real significance lay not in its international acclaim, but in its method. After Orientalism, scholars in the humanities and the social sciences could no longer ignore questions of difference and the politics of representation. Art history, anthropology, history, political science, sociology, philosophy, and literary studies were all forced to confront its vision of culture.
“In a Borgesian way,” Said wrote in his afterword to the 1995 edition, “Orientalism has become several different books.” For some scholars and intellectuals, the book was read as a defense of Islam. Others found in the work the possibility of “writing back,” of giving voice to their experiences silenced by the cultural hegemony of the West. Native Americans, Africans, Asians, Latin Americans, and other colonized peoples and oppressed groups located in Orientalism a method to challenge a chronic tendency of the West to deny, suppress, and distort their cultures and histories. In the academy, this challenge has come to be known as postcolonial studies. Orientalism was seditious in its effects.12
INTRODUCTION TO ORIENTALISM
On a visit to Beirut during the terrible civil war of 1975–1976 a French journalist wrote regretfully of the gutted downtown area that “it had once seemed to belong to . . . the Orient of C
hateaubriand and Nerval.”13 He was right about the place, of course, especially so far as a European was concerned. The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences. Now it was disappearing; in a sense it had happened, its time was over. Perhaps it seemed irrelevant that Orientals themselves had something at stake in the process, that even in the time of Chateaubriand and Nerval Orientals had lived there, and that now it was they who were suffering; the main thing for the European visitor was a European representation of the Orient and its contemporary fate, both of which had a privileged communal significance for the journalist and his French readers.
Americans will not feel quite the same about the Orient, which for them is much more likely to be associated very differently with the Far East (China and Japan, mainly). Unlike the Americans, the French and the British—less so the Germans, Russians, Spanish, Portuguese, Italians, and Swiss—have had a long tradition of what I shall be calling Orientalism, a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western experience. The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other. In addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. Yet none of this Orient is merely imaginative. The Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture. Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles. In contrast, the American understanding of the Orient will seem considerably less dense, although our recent Japanese, Korean, and Indochinese adventures ought now to be creating a more sober, more realistic “Oriental” awareness. Moreover, the vastly expanded American political and economic role in the Near East (the Middle East) makes great claims on our understanding of that Orient.
It will be clear to the reader that by Orientalism I mean several things, all of them interdependent. The most readily accepted designation for Orientalism is an academic one, and indeed the label still serves in a number of academic institutions. Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient—and this applies whether the person is an anthropologist, sociologist, historian, or philologist—either in its specific or its general aspects, is an Orientalist, and what he or she does is Orientalism. Compared with Oriental studies or area studies, it is true that the term Orientalism is less preferred by specialists today, both because it is too vague and general and because it connotes the high-handed executive attitude of nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century European colonialism. Nevertheless books are written and congresses held with “the Orient” as their main focus, with the Orientalist in his new or old guise as their main authority. The point is that even if it does not survive as it once did, Orientalism lives on academically through its doctrines and theses about the Orient and the Oriental.
Related to this academic tradition, whose fortunes, transmigrations, specializations, and transmissions are in part the subject of this study, is a more general meaning for Orientalism. Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the Orient” and (most of the time) “the Occident.” Thus 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 concerning the Orient, its people, customs, “mind,” destiny, and so on. This Orientalism can accommodate Aeschylus, say, and Victor Hugo, Dante and Karl Marx. A little later I shall deal with the methodological problems one encounters in so broadly construed a “field” as this.
The interchange between the academic and the more or less imaginative meanings of Orientalism is a constant one, and since the late eighteenth century there has been a considerable, quite disciplined—perhaps even regulated—traffic between the two. Here I come to the third meaning of Orientalism, which is something more historically and materially defined than either of the other two. Taking the late eighteenth century as a very roughly defined starting point Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient. I have found it useful here to employ Michel Foucault’s notion of a discourse, as described by him in The Archaeology of Knowledge and in Discipline and Punish, to identify Orientalism. My contention is that without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period. Moreover, so authoritative a position did Orientalism have that I believe no one writing, thinking, or acting on the Orient could do so without taking account of the limitations on thought and action imposed by Orientalism. In brief, 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 in) any occasion when that peculiar entity “the Orient” is in question. How this happens is what this book tries to demonstrate. It also tries to show that European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self.
Historically and culturally there is a quantitative as well as a qualitative difference between the Franco-British involvement in the Orient and—until the period of American ascendancy after World War II—the involvement of every other European and Atlantic power. To speak of Orientalism therefore is to speak mainly, although not exclusively, of a British and French cultural enterprise, a project whose dimensions take in such disparate realms as the imagination itself, the whole of India and the Levant, the Biblical texts and the Biblical lands, the spice trade, colonial armies and a long tradition of colonial administrators, a formidable scholarly corpus, innumerable Oriental “experts” and “hands,” an Oriental professorate, a complex array of “Oriental” ideas (Oriental despotism, Oriental splendor, cruelty, sensuality), many Eastern sects, philosophies, and wisdoms domesticated for local European use—the list can be extended more or less indefinitely. My point is that Orientalism derives from a particular closeness experienced between Britain and France and the Orient, which until the early nineteenth century had really meant only India and the Bible lands. From the beginning of the nineteenth century until the end of World War II France and Britain dominated the Orient and Orientalism; since World War II America has dominated the Orient, and approaches it as France and Britain once did. Out of that closeness, whose dynamic is enormously productive even if it always demonstrates the comparatively greater strength of the Occident (British, French, or American), comes the large body of texts I call Orientalist.
II
I have begun with the assumption that the Orient is not an inert fact of nature. It is not merely there, just as the Occident itself is not just there either. We must take seriously Vico’s great observation that men make their own history, that what they can know is what they have made, and extend it to geography: as both geographical and cultural entities—to say nothing of historical entities—such locales, regions, geographical sectors as “Orient” and “Occident” are man-made. Therefore as much as the West itself, the Orient is an idea that has a history an
d a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West. The two geographical entities thus support and to an extent reflect each other.
Having said that, one must go on to state a number of reasonable qualifications. In the first place, it would be wrong to conclude that the Orient was essentially an idea, or a creation with no corresponding reality. 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 Westerners would find to be an 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 location 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. About that fact this study of Orientalism has very little to contribute, except to acknowledge it tacitly. But the phenomenon of Orientalism as I study it here deals principally, not with a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the internal consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient (the East as career) despite or beyond any correspondence, or lack thereof, with a “real” Orient. My point is that Disraeli’s statement about the East refers mainly to that created consistency, that regular constellation of ideas as the preeminent thing about the Orient, and not to its mere being, as Wallace Stevens’s phrase has it.