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Chapter 2, Part 4
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
After reviewing the sweep of Chapters 1 and 2, Said reiterates the premises on which his exploration of Orientalism is based: that fields of learning are embedded in cultural contexts; that both learned and imaginative writing remain subject to this same cultural context and are never truly “free;” and that allegedly objective claims of Orientalist “science” are less objective than they appear. Some of these ideas directly contradict an intuitive sense of progress in humanity, civilization, or knowledge. Yet, Said contends that it’s important to interrogate our academic, scientific, or literary consensuses, especially Orientalism.
Said’s writing style is iterative. Each time he returns to his definition of Orientalism after an extensive period of analysis and examples, he re-grounds readers in his main ideas. He also offers a clear opportunity to reflect on the definition each time readers have gained further contextualization. As his analysis draws closer to the contemporary era, he reiterates the idea that the personal is political—that cultural, social, and political contexts influence thinking. This in turn informs one of his critiques of academic institutions that allow Orientalism (or other unquestioned ideologies) to flourish unchecked.
Themes
Doing this kind of investigative work reveals the inherently political nature of contemporary Orientalism. As a discourse, it is preconditioned by the language and the culture in which it is embedded and which it perpetuates. Because what it has to say is rooted in imperialism, racism, and ethnocentrism, it preconditions the range of ideas late 19th- and early 20th-century Europeans could hold or express about the Orient to be racist, imperialist, and ethnocentric. Importantly, it was easy for this discourse to become entrenched because politically, after the height of Islamic power in the Middle Ages, the Orient had become was weaker than the West.
Said maintains that if or when Western scholars and citizens look critically at the way the Orient (and, more specifically, Islam and Arabs) are depicted—really critically, not through the faux-critical distance of Orientalist discourse—they will see how politics and racial bias influence the conversation. The urgent need for this reappraisal lies beneath the entire project of Orientalism, given the military and economic power of the West in the 19th and 20th centuries, combined with its thirst to control the world.
Themes
Said identifies a manifest and a latent strain of Orientalist discourse. Manifest Orientalism is produced by academics in universities and learned societies; latent Orientalism is a society’s largely subconscious sense of what the Orient stands for. Changes in late 19th-century Orientalism—in which the Orient largely coincides with the Ottoman Empire, that era’s focus for Europe’s colonial ambitions—occur as slight modifications in manifest Orientalism, but the biases of latent Orientalism, which perpetuates stereotypes of the “eccentric, backward, passive, feminine” and helpless Orient. Often, changes in manifest Orientalism merely perpetuate latent Orientalism’s beliefs, as when the theory of evolution is used to prove that Oriental societies are less evolved than Western ones. Little attention is paid to contemporary “thought or culture” in the Orient because according to Orientalist discourse, the Orient exists only to become a possession of the West.
Chapter 2 investigated the way that the manifest Orientalism of Renan, Sacy, Lane, and others influenced and overlapped with the latent Orientalism of Flaubert, Chateaubriand, and Burton. Now, he turns to some of the real-world consequences of this discourse. The Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the 20th century included the territory of modern-day Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, and parts of Saudi Arabia. It was the last vestiges of a once great Muslim empire that stretched across North Africa and into Eastern Europe. Although it was a dynamic and modernized empire, Said argues that this mattered little in the context of colonial greed and the Orientalist discourse that underwrote it. To justify conquering the Ottomans, Europe needed them to be weak and helpless, and Orientalist discourse obligingly depicted them that way.
Themes
This section explores how incorporation and assimilation of the Orient in a geopolitical sense affected Orientalist discourse. The language of empire had become the common tongue of Orientalism by the late 19th century. This is why, in 1916, the British government established a School of Oriental Studies at the University of London, because understanding (that is, classifying and possessing) the Orient is key to the success of the colonial project insofar as Orientalism showed the British how to transform “traditional societies” in the Orient into likeminded and obedient “modern commercial societies.”
By the early 20th century, Orientalism as a discipline openly serves the needs of empire. Thus, the School of Oriental Studies is a clear development on Napoleon’s idea that understanding Egyptian culture and history was an important prerequisite to conquering the country. Yet, as Said’s analysis has shown, the West’s basic assumptions about the Orient haven’t changed since Napoleon’s day, which begs the question of whether academic institutions are actually learning about the Orient or are just regurgitating ideas about it.
Themes
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Orientalism also serves empire because it articulates a rationale for territorial expansion. For example, when the study of geography comes into vogue in the early 20th century, it impacts both latent Orientalism and manifest Orientalism. By eliding national borders and cultural distinctions, geographic Orientalism (like its predecessors) renders the Orient a feminized and fertile blank slate for European activity. In the (latent) cultural sphere, the protagonist of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness stares at maps and fantasizes about claiming the “blank spaces on earth.” In the (manifest) academic sphere, the French seek to make up for territorial losses in the War of 1870 by spinning the globe for new territories like Indochina where they hope to create a “French India.” Orientalist discourse begins to describe the Orient in geographic terms, as a field or garden to be cultivated and subjugated.
Said’s analysis suggests that Orientalism doesn’t serve empire by producing knowledge; it serves empire by giving quasi-scientific and authoritative rationales for imperial desires. The spaces on the map in Heart of Darkness are obviously not empty—there are people and other resources there. They’re only “blank” with reference to Europe. By giving the dehumanization of Oriental subjects the gloss of empirical fact, Orientalism paves the way for colonial expansion. Said contextualizes France’s colonial ambitions in Southeast Asia by pointing out their humiliating loss to the Prussians in an inter-European conflict over national borders.
Themes
Even before World War I, the British and French were plotting to divide the dying Ottoman Empire between themselves, and thus the most dramatic convergence of manifest and latent Orientalist discourse occurs in this realm. The British and the French have competing designs on the Ottoman Empire, and they hope to calm their inter-European rivalry with the fair division of territory. And to do that, both sides deploy Orientalist discourse to justify their claims.
By the early 20th century, the Orient as created by Orientalist discourse has so thoroughly become a site of European action that France and Britain start using it to try to settle their disputes with each other. Obviously, this has serious and long-lasting consequences for Oriental subjects—but these aren’t considered because Oriental subjects are barely people in the eyes of Europe.
Themes
