Previous
Chapter 3, Part 1
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
Said uses the work of British novelist and poet Rudyard Kipling, much of which is set in the Orient, to explore latent Orientalist discourse in the late 19th early 20th centuries. Kipling often writes about the White Man, an “amiable leader” who’s nevertheless willing to use force when necessary. The White Man is culturally constructed yet is so common as to seem like a fact of nature. Like the academic Orientalist, the White Man constantly defines and works to preserve the boundary between “us” and “them.” British soldier T. E. Lawrence and anthropologist Gertrude Bell are real-life examples of the White Man (or Woman) character at work. While both profess a deep respect for the Orient and its inhabitants and customs, neither ever escapes their sense of inherent superiority, and they consistently present their Oriental subjects as manifestations of a timeless, changeless essence rather than as living, complex human beings.
As the flavor of Orientalism grows more actively colonial in Said’s analysis, he introduces another pertinent concept in the character type of the White Man—someone who comes from the West to lead or educated abject and helpless Oriental subjects into modernity or civilization. Theodore Edward Lawrence, also known as Lawrence of Arabia, was an early 20th-century British soldier who was sent (along with others) to spearhead a revolt against the Ottoman Empire by Arab groups during WWI. The British hoped doing so would weaken the Ottoman Empire, their enemy. Although Lawrence lived as a member of the Arab revolutionaries, his writings betray his sense of superiority, in part because he gives himself—not Arab leaders—most of the credit for organizing the revolt. Gertrude Bell was a late 19th- and early-20th century British explorer and archaeologist whose long career in Egypt, Iraq, and elsewhere made her an invaluable advisor to the British government during and immediately after WWI. Again, in both cases, knowledge—of Western war aims or of local languages and culture—gives Westerners power.
Themes
Said then turns his attention to how Orientalism establishes and maintains the set of assumptions that create the character of the eternally primitive and hegemonic Oriental subject. In large part, this grows out of a simplistic faith that sciences—like the linguistics, biology, and anthropology on which contemporary Orientalism is based—always represent facts rather than values. Thus, when debates about the “racial characteristic” of Oriental subjects or the evolutionary stage of various civilizations bled from the esoteric circles of the university and learned society into the broader culture, society wholeheartedly and uncritically embraced whatever generalizations they entailed.
At this point, Said has already shown the real-world political and social consequences of reducing Oriental subjects to a character type. Racism plays a significant role in creating this type in that it supplies the figure of the subordinate and inferior non-White subject. But an overly-credulous academy and public—people who are willing to believe what they’re told rather than to think critically about the world around them—gave these stereotypes and prejudices ample room to take root and flourish into full-fledged Orientalism. The irony, of course, is that in doing so, European policymakers and scholars showed the very same simplemindedness they accused Oriental subjects of.
Themes
One of the most harmful beliefs of modern and contemporary Orientalist discourse is that Jewish and Muslim people—Semitic people—specifically are “primitive,” unable to transcend their “tent and tribe” mentality or to reclaim the greatness of their ancestral civilizations. This is reinforced each time an Orientalist or White Man reproduces the same racists and essentializing tropes while claiming to have discovered the truth about the Orient through personal experience. Thus, William Robertson Smith’s influential account of his trip through modern-day Saudi Arabia in the early 1880s consistently collapses Muslim people, modern Islam, and ancient Islam into one generic category, which he judges as primitive, conservative, barbarous, obsolete, hypocritical, and wrongheaded.
Having established the racist tenor of Orientalist discourse specifically, Said homes in on some of its most pernicious manifestations, antisemitism and anti-Arab or Islamophobic beliefs. Said tends to focus more on the Islamophobic aspects of Orientalism, given changing attitudes toward Jewish people in the wake of World War II, although part of his argument rests on the idea that while the targets of Orientalism might change over time, the way the discourse operates and its basic assumptions about inferiority don’t. The way people like William Robertson Smith describe Arab subjects is blatantly racist, but in a way that’s often overlooked because Orientalist discourse had already given the aura of scientific accuracy and empirical truth to any observations about the difference and comparative backwardness of Oriental subjects.
Themes
With increasing colonial involvement, the Orientalist project shifts to compelling the Orient to serve European interests. This requires the White Man’s role to evolve into manipulation (rather than simple observation) of the contemporary Orient. This requires a static and visionary Orient, so early 20th-century Orientalist discourse works hard to downplay and sideline any suggestions that Oriental subjects and societies are capable of growth, evolution, and self-determination. Thus, for example, Western Orientalist discourse gives credit for the Arab Revolt to its Western masters, like T. E. Lawrence. In his own accounts, Lawrence understands his role as necessary because he sees Arab people as essentially helpless without a strongman leader. And because he conveniently ignores history or any interrogation of what his Arab compatriots might have themselves hoped to accomplish during the Revolt, he makes himself the central hero of their story.
An important part of European powers’ justifications for their imperial and colonial projects is the assertion that the people they are conquering need care or direction by a beneficent civilization. Thus, it must silence any evidence that indigenous people were doing just fine on their own. The whitewashing of the Arab Revolt by Lawrence and others provides one example of this. Orientalist discourse allows the British to get what they want while conveniently erasing the needs or desires of other groups than themselves. Lawrence’s British government isn’t interested in helping the Arab Revolutionaries achieve their own aims (the establishment of Arab self-rule from Egypt to Iran). It’s interested in weakening the Ottoman Empire both to win WWI and to gain more territory for itself in the Eastern Mediterranean region.
Themes
Get the entire Orientalism LitChart as a printable PDF.
The mythology of the White Man seems to bring East and West closer together than ever while nevertheless strictly maintaining a sense of difference and division—regardless of whether one’s culture is in ascendance in the East (as Lawrence’s Britain was) or not, as in the works of Frenchman Maurice Barrès. Barrès sought to a French narrative on the orient by looking for (and finding) a “constructive French role” in the Levant during a trip in 1914. Of course, he finds what he’s looking for: touring French schools assures him that France still represents the epitome of Western culture, “spiritually, justice […] and the ideal,” and that her example has the potential to lift the Orient from its backwardness. Yet even as he expresses his hope for this outcome, his ongoing belief that the Oriental mind is somehow different, if not antithetical, to the Western one, persists.
It's easy to see the way Orientalist discourse works (and to trace its impacts on Oriental subjects) in the case of blatant colonialism (Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, for example) or geopolitical strategy (like Lawrence’s role in the Arab Revolt). Said wants to make readers see how the same logic works in much more subtle but equally harmful ways when it comes to soft power. Barrès obviously writes for the benefit of a Western audience, and his assurances about their superiority are meant to make them feel better. But their sense of superiority rests on a racially informed ideas and a reductionist presentation of the Orient according to the logic of Orientalism, not according to its reality as a vibrant, living, and changing place.
Themes
As, the tenor of Orientalism shifts from an academic to an “instrumental attitude,” Orientalists starts seeing themselves more as representatives of their governments than their academic disciplines. The need to control the Orient through discourse as well as political power increased between the World Wars as Oriental subjects began to make claims for independence (encouraged when it was expedient for Europe, as in the Arab Revolt, discouraged when not.) In this period, academic Orientalists like Sylvian Lévi, president of the French “Société asiatique,” become increasingly vocal about the need to answer the so-called Eastern Question before it reaches a crisis—not just for the benefit of the West, of course, but also for the good of colonial subjects portrayed as too primitive to be trusted with their own futures.
The comments made by Sylvian Levi—which are roughly contemporaneous with and run in parallel to Balfour’s and Cromer’s at the beginning of Chapter 1—implicitly recognize the autonomy and political power of Oriental subjects, because their actions give rise to the “question” at hand. But explicitly, Orientalists like Levi, Balfour, and Cromer work to fence off and limit this autonomy, first through rhetoric—insisting that Oriental subjects are what Orientalists say they are, not what they show themselves to be through their actions—and then, through direct actions that shore up Western social dominance and political control.
Themes
The need to see the modern Orient as it is—but “see” in an Orientalist sense of categorizing, organizing and extracting intellectual and political resources—becomes more urgent even as the West otherwise embraces modern political liberalism. Authority to mandate and rule the Orient is still, as it ever was, based on dehumanizing Oriental subjects. This is as true in latent Orientalist discourse as in its manifest forms. For example, in 1939, George Orwell describes the residents of Marrakesh as “undifferentiated brown stuff” rather than the “same flesh” as the White European subject.
The blatant hypocrisy of Orientalist discourse becomes more obvious to Said the closer his analysis draws to the contemporary era. As a political philosophy, liberalism suggests the goodness of human subjects, the idea of civilizational progress, an emphasis on individual freedom and autonomy, and a support for civil liberties. Orientalist discourse denies Oriental subjects these rights and freedoms, then uses the lack of these rights and freedoms in so-called Oriental societies as evidence for the backwardness (if not outright inhumanity) of Oriental subjects. And it does this, as Orwell’s words suggest, with a large (if unrecognized) dose of plain racism.
Themes
Importantly from Said’s late 20th-century vantage point, in the inter- and post-World War era, the ongoing need to control the Orient becomes ever more strongly associated with fearmongering about Islam and Muslim people. And this happens even in the context of otherwise “purportedly liberal culture[s].” In its most advanced form, Orientalism argues that it wants to offer the benefits of liberal society to Oriental subjects, while actually deploying the alleged liberality of modern Western civilization as a tool of “oppression and mentalistic prejudice.”
For Said, who grew up as an Oriental subject, it is fairly easy to see how Orientalist discourse works, yet his book suggests how difficult it is for Western readers to see Orientalism at work, because the discourse is so common and deeply rooted in social and political ideas. His intellectual project therefore seeks to reduce Orientalism’s stranglehold on Western imagination and policy by revealing its motives and moves.
Themes
