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Intro
Edward Said begins his book by laying out the multiple and liked definitions of Orientalism. In one sense, Orientalism is an academic discipline and anyone who studies or writes about the Orient is an Orientalist. But Orientalism is also a discourse, a style of thinking predicated on a belief in a fundamental distinction between the Orient and the West, and it’s the way that people have used this discourse to dominate and restructure the Orient to serve Western interests. Then, Said outlines the themes the book will explore in its survey of Orientalism’s many faces: the distinction between pure and political knowledge; the unique position of Britain, France, and America as Orientalist societies; and the way that personal and social investments color any scholar’s work, whether that scholar acknowledges them or not.
The first chapter begins with British attitudes toward the question of Egypt and India at the turn of the 20th century, then flashes forward to Henry Kissinger, writing about the political uprisings and discontents in the Near East, Southeast Asia, and Asia in the second half of the 20th century. These accounts are united by their use of Orientalist discourse. The academic discipline of Orientalism was founded in 1312 when medieval European universities began to offer instruction in Arabic, Greek, and Hebrew, but some of its assumptions—namely, about the irreconcilable difference between the East and West, the sense of danger posed to the West by the East, and the Western desire to dominate the East—date back to the ancient Greeks.
These ideas quietly circulate, but they aren’t expanded much until the end of the 18th century. Two events at this time—an increasing interest in the study of ancient languages and Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798—lead to an Orientalist renaissance. Now there is demand in Europe for experts to explain the Orient to a European audience. Linguists and men of science like Silvestre de Sacy, William Jones, Jean-Baptiste-Jospeh Fourier, and others rise to the occasion and begin to do this work. Their highly mediated version of Semitic and Indian cultures begins to solidify Orientalist discourse—the set of received ideas that limit and define what one can say about the region and its cultures.
In the 19th century, Orientalist discourse has become quite entrenched in French and British societies. This can be seen in the way it underwrites literary and artistic creations, such as the novels of Gustave Flaubert and Gérard de Nerval, among others. Orientalism is increasingly used in this period to justify and enable colonial projects in Egypt and the Near East as European colonial empires reach their greatest extents around the turn of the 20th century. Academic studies like Edward William Lane’s survey of Egyptian customs and the travelogues of François-René Chateaubriand, Alphonse Lamartine, and Richard Burton both confirm and promulgate Orientalist ideas, with an increasingly narrow focus on Arab and Muslim subjects.
In the early 20th century, Orientalism becomes increasingly geopolitical and less academic as trade and modernization increase but Britain and France lose colonial territory in the East. By now, Orientalism is so entrenched that the figure of the White Man—an allegedly benevolent but often domineering man intent on modernizing people he sees as savages—appears both in literature (Rudyard Kipling wrote many books centering the White Man) and in real life in the figure of men like T. E. Lawrence who travel to the Orient as agents of British imperial power.
In the post-war period, however, Orientalism reaches a crisis as it becomes clear that the discourse cannot adequately explain things like nationalist and independence movements in Egypt and Iraq because the discourse has always posited that Oriental subjects are irrational, passive, and incapable of facing changing circumstances. Pressed to explain these puzzling developments, Orientalism migrates toward the social sciences from the humanities, and it becomes increasingly policy focused. Orientalists of this period (for instance, Gibb, Massignon, and Grunebaum) make strenuous efforts to explain Muslim and Arab subjects to the West, although their explanations are mostly rehashings of previous Orientalist discourse that fail to move the conversation forward.
It’s in this context that Said sets out to unveil Orientalist discourse, show that it’s more committed to promulgating its own received ideas or to advancing the cause of Western colonialism and imperialism, and explore how Orientalists’ assertions that they are rational and neutral have made it harder for them to do meaningful work. As a way forward, Said suggests that academic disciplines need to consider their ties to social and political power structures and disinvest from colonial and imperial ideology. He also makes an impassioned plea for empathy and for a reconsideration of Oriental subjects as human beings, complex, diverse, and homogenous, rather than as the unified bloc that Orientalism has made them out to be for the past nine centuries and more.
