Orientalism Study Guide

Edward Said was born into a Palestinian Christian family in Jerusalem in 1935. Although both Said’s parents had been born in the Ottoman Empire, the entire family was granted United States citizenship following his father’s voluntary service for the American Expeditionary Forces during World War I. Said’s family left Jerusalem at the beginning of the 1947-1949 Palestine War, first relocating to Egypt and then to America. Although he struggled with disciplinary issues in high school, Said was successful in secondary education, receiving his BA in English literature from Princeton, and a Master’s and PhD from Harvard. Said became a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in 1963, where he remained for his entire career. Trained primarily as a literary critic, Said became a public intellectual with the publication of Orientalism in 1978. This book became one of the foundational documents of the new scholarly discipline of Post-Colonial Studies, which seeks to understand the long-term social, political, and cultural consequences of colonialism and imperialism on formerly colonized societies. Said was also a vocal advocate of Palestinian resistance, especially after the 1967 Six-Day War. Said’s anti-Zionist positions and his critique of U.S. foreign policy, especially as it related to the Middle East and Islam, as well as his intellectual critiques of well-established and influential Orientalist scholars in Orientalism, made him a controversial figure. During his life, his political stances drew the attention of the FBI and resulted in numerous death threats and attempts to oust him from his academic position; once his office at Columbia University was even firebombed. Said died in 2003 at the age of 67, following a long battle with leukemia.

Edward Said firmly locates Orientalism and Orientalist discourse in the context of a long history of exchange and contention between Christian Europe and the Muslim and Arab cultures of the Near East. These include the establishment of trade relationships between Europe and the countries of the Silk Road and similar trade routes; the establishment of a Umayyad rule in Spain and the resulting centuries of military campaigns by which Christian rules reconquered that territory; and the Crusades fought over control of the Levant—modern day Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jorda, and Palestine—between Christian European forces and Muslim Arab forces between 1029 and 1291. In the 18th and 19th centuries, European colonial ambitions meant that European countries had colonized over 80% of the earth—including all of the areas that fall under the thought-category of the Orient—by 1914. In the later 20th century, Orientalism is a concern for Edward Said because of contemporary discussions of and beliefs about Arab and Muslim subjects and countries as they related to American geopolitical plans. Two events that shaped public discourse were the 1967 Six-Day War between Israel and Egypt and its Arab allies and the 1973 Oil Embargo, during which OPEC (Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kuwait, Kuwait, Libya, Indonesia, and Venezuela) stopped exporting oil to countries (including the United States) that had supported Israel during the Six-Day War.

Orientalism is a work of cultural criticism that examines colonial history and asserts a need for Western scholars, policymakers, and ordinary citizens to seriously reevaluate their received ideas about countries and cultures that have been absorbed under the umbrella of the Orient—particularly Arab and Muslim people, as well as those living in the areas of modern-day Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Turkey, and the Arabian Peninsula. In its plea for reappraisal and its attempts to give a voice to the peoples whose voices have been subsumed by Orientalist discourse, it does similar work to Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism. This book, published in 1950, is a sort of call to arms for colonial and former colonial subjects to free themselves from the narratives about their own inferiority that European nations used to subjugate them. Like Orientalism, Discourse on Colonialism is also considered a foundational text of post-colonial literary and cultural criticism. In creating the framework for Orientalism, Edward Said consciously draws on the example of Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (1929). In them, Gramsci elaborates on the idea of cultural hegemony—the way a ruling class shapes a shared identity for a diverse population in order to better achieve its aims—and makes an eloquent argument for the ways in which the personal and the political are related, making it incumbent on responsible intellectuals and scholars to examine honesty their personal, political, and intellectual commitments.