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Chapter 1, Part 3
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Orientalism, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The West’s View of the Eastern World
Knowledge and Power
Belief, Consensus, and Reality
The Persistence of Racism
The Personal as Political
Summary
Analysis
In the mid-20th century, when Said is writing, the academic discipline of Orientalism is coming under fire for its links to geopolitical power and colonial oppression. Said finds the roots of this crisis in the way the discourse of academic Orientalism became aligned with imperial projects following Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt.
Said’s critique of Orientalism is both a geopolitical and an academic one. As a literary scholar, his field (literary studies) is related to and in some cases interwoven with the academic field of Oriental Studies. In asking readers to consider the geopolitical impacts of Orientalist discourse, he’s both showing how Orientalism itself works and showing how the control of knowledge can generate power—for good or for ill.
Themes
Before delving into how, Said describes what he means by “discourse.” Orientalism is a particular way of looking at the world mediated by ideas that primarily circulate in books. One way to understand the idea of a discourse is to think about how a travel or instructional book might match up (or not) with a reader’s experience of reality. When there’s a discrepancy, readers often give the book’s authority greater weight than their own experiences, which they begin to suspect. Conversely, when a person’s experience confirms what the books say, the books seem even more authoritative. By setting readers’ expectations, Said points out, the books aren’t just describing reality but creating it, too. The accumulated weight of these expectations is a discourse. The ability to self-reinforce—each contribution shores up the whole edifice—is another important component of discourses.
Although Said brought up the idea of discourse in the introduction, he revisits it in the first chapter in greater detail. This is typical of Said’s writing style, which is iterative and interwoven. He revisits key ideas at various points throughout the book in ways that create a densely layered argument. In his analogy, he shows how a discourse can reinforce itself even when it fails to do its job of explaining how the world works. It’s easiest to see how controlling information generates power when reality doesn’t conform to the discourse’s claims. In a way, a discourse seems little different from a conspiracy theory, except that it has more cultural currency.
Themes
The discourse of Orientalism begins in universities and is associated with a great expansion of knowledge in the West. But its central thesis—that the Orient is unchanging, utterly foreign, and inferior to the West—obviously has political force, too. This political force lies beneath the consistent debasement of the Orient and Oriental subjects, especially as the field expanded and developed in the 18th century.
The more mismatches there are between a discourse and reality, the more urgent it becomes to understand what purpose the discourse’s lies and manipulations serve. If Said reiterates the connection between Orientalist discourse and colonial conquest time and again in the book, it’s because he feels that the West has successfully buried this connection—and he offers the history of Western domination in the Near East and beyond to prove it.
Themes
The first characteristic of this period is a growing sense of disenchantment. Early Orientalists produced a body of work that excavated a glorious, glorified, and sanitized Oriental past. With increasing colonial involvement, more Europeans visited—and were disappointed by—the modern Orient. This led, in some cases, to a redoubled commitment to the grandeur of the imaginary Orient. Similarly, increasing contact between East and West exposed Europeans to plenty of contradictions between their generalized and generalizing ideas about the Orient and the real Orient, leading to anxious efforts to shore up the discourse and hide these contradictions behind a wall of words.
The first crisis for Orientalism comes as an increasingly wealthy, modern, and mobile society gains a greater ability to experience the world firsthand rather than through the mediation of experts. First-hand knowledge, which has the potential to expose discourse, is a powerful force. But the logic of a discourse operates to take away that power. Said’s argument basically asserts that, faced with a disconnect between a received idea and reality, most people find it more comforting to insist on the truth of the received idea rather than to admit they were wrong or to reassess their thinking. This is the human habit that a discourse exploits.
Themes
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In the 19th century, the Orient piques travelers’ curiosity, visitors find the modern Orient disappointing, Orientalists assuage this disappointment by explaining it away in books that inspire new travelers to visit the Orient, and so the cycle continues. But in the years between World War I and the 1950s, this system becomes untenable as all the countries in the former Orient claim independence from their colonizers. And awareness about the ways that Orientalism is out of line with modern humanistic and social science research increases. The career of Hamilton Gibb illustrates this conundrum and Orientalism’s attempts to grapple with it. In 1945, Gibb is comfortable describing Islam in baldly Orientalist (that is, racist and essentializing) terms. By 1963, Gibb advocates for augmenting the Orientalist’s expertise with the new approaches of the social science in an interdisciplinary approach.
Said reserves his harshest criticisms for Orientalist academics because they are operating at the conflux of two discourses—one which tells them that the Orient is essentially bad or backward and that encourages them to align their scholarship with this thesis, and one which tells them that as scholars, their work is neutral. From his viewpoint as an Oriental subject, Said knows that the latter isn’t true. The problem isn’t that a scholar like Gibb exists, necessarily. It’s that scholars like Gibb seem to be genuinely incapable of recognizing their biases. And their willing blindness turns them into tools in the hands of the politically savvy and powerful.
Themes
At this crossroads, Orientalism has three options: pretend that nothing has changed; adapt the old patterns to changing times; or abandon the outdated discourse altogether. When Orientalist discourse refuses to acknowledge changing circumstances, it perpetuates the silencing and oppression of Oriental subjects. It silences those who object to colonial oppression by insisting that Oriental subjects cannot understand or practice self-governance like Westerners. For example, Orientalism sees Arab Palestinians’ resistance to Israeli occupation in solely religious, rather than historical, political, or economic terms because in Orientalist discourse, Islam blindly opposes all “non-Islamic peoples.” And these injustices only get worse as Orientalists in the post-World War II era increasingly abandon the academy for government positions.
At this point, Said’s argument directly addresses the part of his audience composed of other academics—scholars, researchers, professors. Orientalism builds on late 20th century work in the humanities and social sciences that began to reveal how discourses work and the harm they can cause. Said also speaks here about the power Western societies in Europe and the United States have over the world. The consequences of anti-Islamic or anti-Arab biases in public discourse aren’t theoretical. Orientalist discourse seeks to control the narrative of the Israel-Palestine conflict by casting it in only one light—as a battle between Judaism and Islam. Not only does this ignore the political or economic impacts of the conflict, but a focus on Islam also ignores the complex reality of Palestinian society. Said himself came from a Palestinian Christian family that fled the conflict when he was a child. For him, the political is deeply personal. And as an Oriental subject, he asks his readers to recognize the humanity—and complexity—of people like himself.
Themes
The contemporary West tends to dismiss Oriental subjects and their demands for freedom and self-determination as “a nuisance [and] an insult.” Racist and prejudicial Orientalist attitudes are just as common as in the past, if not more, thanks to wide dissemination in the press and popular culture. The result, as described by Egyptian political scientist Anwar Abdel Malek, is an attitude among middle-class Westerners that they have a monopoly on humanity and thus have the right to own and manage the sub humanized, non-White world.
Not only does Orientalist discourse serve the interests of the powerful by cloaking their goals in an aura of academic objectivity, but it also licenses racism and prejudice by positioning stereotypes as facts. The overt colonialism of previous eras has been replaced with a sort of cultural or spiritual colonialism in which Westerners don’t think of themselves as better because they’re Westerners, per se, but because they have been encouraged to see some marginalized groups—particularly Arab and Muslim people—as subhuman.
Themes
This attitude sums up what Said sees as a unique and enduring aspect of Orientalism as a geopolitical discourse: the idea that the West is “actor […] spectator, […] judge and jury” of a completely passive, static, and monolithic Orient. Thus, the demands of Oriental subjects for self-determination—demands that even appear aggressive to Western eyes—are a shock. And instead of updating their views, modern Orientalists continue to circumscribe Oriental subjects with jargon. In this context, Said proposes not only to demonstrate the disparity between Orientalist discourse and reality (the focus of the first chapter) but to reflect on what the humanities more generally can learn from Orientalism’s failures.
Again, Said returns his focus to the two characters in the Orientalist drama: the active, conquering, fully human (and often male) Western subject and the passive, abject, dehumanized (and often feminized) Oriental subject. These two characters—in the form of the Oriental subject and the White Man character types—will be explored in depth throughout the rest of the chapter. It’s a testament to the enduring power of Orientalist discourse that as the world changes—as formerly colonized populations declare their freedom throughout the end of the 20th century, for example—it continues to refuse to acknowledge that Oriental subjects are fully human, and it continues to deny them autonomy—in ways that helpfully align with Western political goals.
Themes
