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Ernest Renan
Thomas Edward Lawrence was a 19th-century British military officer, diplomat, and writer. A student of history and an archeologist, Lawrence’s academic career was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I, during which he served as an interpreter until he was dispatched with a group of other British officers to oversee the Arab Revolt. Lawrence embedded himself with a group of Arab revolutionaries whom the British supported in an uprising as part of a British strategy to further undermine and weaken the Ottoman Empire. A vivid writer and storyteller, Lawrence’s later accounts of this time would immortalize him as “Lawrence of Arabia.” In Orientalism, Said sees Lawrence as a living example of Rudyard Kipling’s White Man character type in how Lawrence considers himself the kind of enlightened leader the Arab revolutionaries need because he accepts as truth Orientalist assertions about the backwardness and ineffectuality of Oriental subjects.
T. E. Lawrence Quotes in Orientalism
The Orientalism quotes below are all either spoken by T. E. Lawrence or refer to T. E. Lawrence. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 3, Part 2
Quotes
Being a White Man was therefore an idea and a reality. It involved a reasoned position towards both the white and the non-white worlds. It meant—in the colonies—speaking in a certain way, behaving according to a code of regulations, and even feeling certain things and not others. It meant specific judgements, evaluations, gestures. It was a form of authority before which nonwhites, and even whites themselves, were expected to bend. In the institutional forms it took (colonial governments, consular corps, commercial establishments) it was an agency for the expression, diffusion, and implementation of policy towards the world, and within this agency, although a certain personal latitude was allowed, the communal idea of being a White Man ruled. Being a White Man, in short, was a very concrete manner of being-in-the-world, a way of taking hold of reality, language, and thought. It made a specific style possible.
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Our of such a coercive framework, by which a modern “colored” man is chained irrevocably to the general truths formulated about his prototypical linguistic, anthropological, and doctrinal forbears by a white European scholar, the work of the great twentieth-century Oriental experts in England and France derived. To this framework these experts also brought their private mythology and obsessions. […] Each […] believed his vision of things Oriental was individual, self-created out of some intensely personal encounter with the Orient, Islam, or the Arabs; each expressed general contempt for official knowledge held about the East. […] Yet in the final analysis they all […] expressed the traditional Western hostility to and fear of the Orient.
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The main issue for [early 20th- century Orientalists] was preserving the Orient and Islam under the control of the White Man.
A new dialectic emerges out of this project. What is required of the Oriental expert is no longer simply “understanding”: now the Orient must be made to perform, its power must be enlisted on the side of “our” values, civilization, interests, goals. Knowledge of the Orient is directly translated into activity, and the results give rise to new currents of thought and trends in the Orient. But these in turn will require from the White Man a new assertion of control, this time not as the author of a scholarly work on the Orient but as the maker of contemporary history, of the Orient as an urgent actuality […]
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T. E. Lawrence Quotes in Orientalism
The Orientalism quotes below are all either spoken by T. E. Lawrence or refer to T. E. Lawrence. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 3, Part 2
Quotes
Being a White Man was therefore an idea and a reality. It involved a reasoned position towards both the white and the non-white worlds. It meant—in the colonies—speaking in a certain way, behaving according to a code of regulations, and even feeling certain things and not others. It meant specific judgements, evaluations, gestures. It was a form of authority before which nonwhites, and even whites themselves, were expected to bend. In the institutional forms it took (colonial governments, consular corps, commercial establishments) it was an agency for the expression, diffusion, and implementation of policy towards the world, and within this agency, although a certain personal latitude was allowed, the communal idea of being a White Man ruled. Being a White Man, in short, was a very concrete manner of being-in-the-world, a way of taking hold of reality, language, and thought. It made a specific style possible.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Our of such a coercive framework, by which a modern “colored” man is chained irrevocably to the general truths formulated about his prototypical linguistic, anthropological, and doctrinal forbears by a white European scholar, the work of the great twentieth-century Oriental experts in England and France derived. To this framework these experts also brought their private mythology and obsessions. […] Each […] believed his vision of things Oriental was individual, self-created out of some intensely personal encounter with the Orient, Islam, or the Arabs; each expressed general contempt for official knowledge held about the East. […] Yet in the final analysis they all […] expressed the traditional Western hostility to and fear of the Orient.
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Explanation and Analysis:
The main issue for [early 20th- century Orientalists] was preserving the Orient and Islam under the control of the White Man.
A new dialectic emerges out of this project. What is required of the Oriental expert is no longer simply “understanding”: now the Orient must be made to perform, its power must be enlisted on the side of “our” values, civilization, interests, goals. Knowledge of the Orient is directly translated into activity, and the results give rise to new currents of thought and trends in the Orient. But these in turn will require from the White Man a new assertion of control, this time not as the author of a scholarly work on the Orient but as the maker of contemporary history, of the Orient as an urgent actuality […]
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