Edward Said: Brief Bio

Edward Said is a preeminent scholar and an important figure in postcolonial studies. A professor of Comparative Literature at ColumbiaUniversity, he is also well known as an activist in Middle Eastern politics.

Said was born in Jerusalem, Palestine in 1935. His mother was of Lebanese descent and his father was a successful Palestinian book merchant. The family had homes in Palestine, Cairo, Egypt, and a vacation home in Lebanon.

In 1948, while Said was a grade school student (at a private English school in Cairo) the state of Israel was created and 80 percent of the Palestinian population was left without a home. Said did not return to Palestine until 1990.

Said was a privileged child and had little interest in the conflict between Israel and Palestine. His educational life was one of private school wealth, but perhaps most importantly, it was in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious community.

In 1951, Said was expelled from VictoriaCollege in Cairo for poor behavior. Since his father had acquired American citizenship some years earlier, Edward was also an American citizen. He was sent to the United States and he finished high school at a private boarding school in New England. Upon graduation he went to PrincetonUniversity and studied English literature and history. He pursued his graduate studies at Harvard. His Ph.D. dissertation was on Joseph Conrad.

The Suez Crisis made quite an impact on him as an Arab-Palestinian, but now established in academic life in the U.S., he did not get involved in politics of the situation. However, the Israeli victory over the Arab forces in 1967, and the Israeli occupation of the last remaining Palestinian territories, forced Said to take a political stance for the liberation of Palestine. In 1968 he wrote his first article about the Palestinian cause: "The Arab Portrayed."

In 1970 Said went to visit his family in Beirut, and while there got caught up in the struggle for the liberation of Palestine. He became part of a community of academics and writers who were involved in various colonial and postcolonial struggles. During this time Said translated the speeches of Yassir Arafat into English for the Western press. He became an articulate voice for the liberation of Palestine in Europe and the U.S. He remained independent and never affiliated with a political party. However in 1977, Said was elected to the Palestinian National Congress in exile.

Also during the 1970's Said, as an academic in the field of comparative literature began writing on contemporary Arab literature; such authors as Naguib Mahfouz, Elias Khouri, and the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.

In 1975-1976 Said was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study at StanfordUniversity. It was while he was at Stanford that he wrote Orientalism. Over the next three years, he published Covering Islam (1981) and The Question of Palestine (1979), which, in conjunction with Orientalism, has been called his trilogy.

In the 1980's and 1990's Said effectively used his fame to further the cause of Palestine and to advocate for human rights. In the 1980's Said actively lobbied the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to re-think the strategy of armed struggle toward liberation and urged Palestinians and all Arabs to understand the importance of mutual respect and co-existence with Israelis. He advocated a two-state solution. As a temperate voice, he made many friends within Israel.

During this period, Said became a target of personal attack by conservative Jewish and Christian Zionists. These attacks on Said suggest an "Orientalism" on the part of the right-wing Zionists. As an articulate Arab intellectual, Said was viewed as a threat. In 1985 the Jewish Defense League called him a "Nazi." A short time later his office at Columbia was burned.

In 1991 Said resigned his position on the Palestinian National Congress, and broke with Arafat. He was critical of the peace agreement between Israel and the PLO made at Oslo, and felt that the PLO "lacked credibility and moral authority."

The 1990's was a politically and personally difficult period for Said. In 1991 he was diagnosed with leukemia. The pain, suffering, and lengthy hospitalization prompted him to write a memoir. Out of Place relates the experiences of his youth and his feelings of exile. Said's illness went into remission, but it still took a toll on his health and lifestyle. It was during this period that he returned to Palestine for the first time since his childhood.

In 1993 Said published his most comprehensive works on postcolonial study, Culture and Imperialism, and in 1994, Representations of the Intellectual. These two books, in his field of comparative literature, brought him again into prominence in the academic community. Said became the president of the Modern Language Association in 1998.
Despite his illness, Edward Said has continued to be an activist for the peace, human rights and social justice. As his health permits, he travels an international lecture route. He also writes a regular column for the Egyptian newspaper al-Ahram, which appears in English and Arabic and also online.

Introduction to Orientalism and Orientalism

Orientalism is:

  • “the study of Near and Far Eastern societies and cultures, languages, and peoples by Western scholars.”
  • “the imitation or depiction of aspects of Eastern cultures in the West by writers, designers and artists”

The former meaning has negative connotations because it refers to the study of the East by Westerners shaped by the attitudes of the era of European imperialism in the 18th and 19th centuries. It implies old-fashioned and prejudiced outsider interpretations of Eastern cultures and peoples. This viewpoint was most famously articulated and propagated by Edward Said in his controversial 1978 book Orientalism, which was critical of this scholarly tradition and of a few modern scholars, including Princeton University professor Bernard Lewis.

Meaning of the term

  • OrientalismandOrient, derive from the Latin word oriens ("east", "rising [sun]"), and, equally likely, from the Greek word ('h'oros', the direction of the rising sun).
  • "Orient" is the opposite of Occident. (Despite "Occident" being uncommon English usage, both the "Orient" and "Occident" usages are current in French and Spanish. Similar words are the French-derived Levant and Anatolia, deriving from the Greekanatole, two further locutions denoting the direction from which the sun rises.)

The Terms

The Orient signifies a system of representations framed by political forces that brought the Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness, and Western empire. The Orient exists for the West, and is constructed by and in relation to the West. It is a mirror image of what is inferior and alien ("Other") to the West.

Orientalism is "a manner of regularized (or Orientalized) writing, vision, and study, dominated by imperatives, perspectives, and ideological biases ostensibly suited to the Orient." It is the image of the 'Orient' expressed as an entire system of thought and scholarship.

The Oriental is the person represented by such thinking. The man is depicted as feminine, weak, yet strangely dangerous because he poses a threat to white, Western women. The woman is both eager to be dominated and strikingly exotic. The Oriental is a single image, a sweeping generalization, a stereotype that crosses countless cultural and national boundaries.

Latent Orientalism is the unconscious, untouchable certainty about what the Orient is. Its basic content is static and unanimous. The Orient is seen as separate, eccentric, backward, silently different, sensual, and passive. It has a tendency towards despotism and away from progress. It displays feminine penetrability and supine malleability. Its progress and value are judged in terms of, and in comparison to, the West, so it is always the Other, the conquerable, and the inferior.

Manifest Orientalism is what is spoken and acted upon. It includes information and changes in knowledge about the Orient as well as policy decisions founded in Orientalist thinking. It is the expression in words and actions of Latent Orientalism.

Chronological implications of the Orient

  • In time, the common understanding of 'the Orient' has continually shifted East, as Western explorers traveled farther in to Asia.
  • In terms of The Old World, Europe was considered The Occident (The West), and its farthest-known extreme The Orient (The East).
  • In Biblical times, the Three Wise Men 'from the Orient' were actually Magi from "The East", (relative to Judea), probably meaning the Persian Empire or Arabia. After a period, as Europe learned of countries farther East, the defined limit of 'the Orient' shifted eastwards, until reaching the Pacific Ocean, to what Occidentals (westerners) knew as 'the Far East'.
  • Dating from the Roman Empire until the Middle Ages, what is now, in the West, considered 'the Middle East' was then considered 'the Orient'. In that time, the flourishing cultures of the Far East were unknown; likewise Europe was unknown in and to the Far East.
  • In contemporary English, Oriental is usually synonymous for the peoples, cultures, and goods from the parts of East Asia traditionally occupied by East Asians and Southeast Asians racially categorised "Mongoloid". This excludes Indians, Arabs, and the other West Asian peoples. In some parts of the United States, the term is considered derogatory; for example, Washington state prohibits use of the word "Oriental" in legislation and government documentation, preferring the word "Asian" instead.

Earlier Orientalism

The first 'Orientalists' were 19th century scholars who translated the writings of 'the Orient' into English, based on the assumption that a truly effective colonial conquest required knowledge of the conquered peoples. This idea of knowledge as power is present throughout Said's critique. By knowing the Orient, the West came to own it. The Orient became the studied, the seen, the observed, the object; Orientalist scholars were the students, the seers, the observers, the subject. The Orient was passive; the West was active.

One of the most significant constructions of Orientalist scholars is that of the Orient itself. What is considered the Orient is a vast region, one that spreads across a myriad of cultures and countries. It includes most of Asia as well as the Middle East. The depiction of this single 'Orient' which can be studied as a cohesive whole is one of the most powerful accomplishments of Orientalist scholars. It essentializes an image of a prototypical Oriental--a biological inferior that is culturally backward, peculiar, and unchanging--to be depicted in dominating and sexual terms. The discourse and visual imagery of Orientalism is laced with notions of power and superiority, formulated initially to facilitate a colonizing mission on the part of the West and perpetuated through a wide variety of discourses and policies. The language is critical to the construction. The feminine and weak Orient awaits the dominance of the West; it is a defenseless and unintelligent whole that exists for, and in terms of, its Western counterpart. The importance of such a construction is that it creates a single subject matter where none existed, a compilation of previously unspoken notions of the Other. Since the notion of the Orient is created by the Orientalist, it exists solely for him or her. Its identity is defined by the scholar who gives it life.

Contemporary Orientalism

Said argues that Orientalism can be found in current Western depictions of "Arab" cultures. The depictions of "the Arab" as irrational, menacing, untrustworthy, anti-Western, dishonest, and--perhaps most importantly--prototypical, are ideas into which Orientalist scholarship has evolved. These notions are trusted as foundations for both ideologies and policies developed by the Occident. Said writes: "The hold these instruments have on the mind is increased by the institutions built around them. For every Orientalist, quite literally, there is a support system of staggering power, considering the ephemerality of the myths that Orientalism propagates. The system now culminates into the very institutions of the state. To write about the Arab Oriental world, therefore, is to write with the authority of a nation, and not with the affirmation of a strident ideology but with the unquestioning certainty of absolute truth backed by absolute force." He continues, "One would find this kind of procedure less objectionable as political propaganda--which is what it is, of course--were it not accompanied by sermons on the objectivity, the fairness, the impartiality of a real historian, the implication always being that Muslims and Arabs cannot be objective but that Orientalists. . .writing about Muslims are, by definition, by training, by the mere fact of their Westernness. This is the culmination of Orientalism as a dogma that not only degrades its subject matter but also blinds its practitioners."

Edward Said and "Orientalism"

Said’s central ideas on “orientalism”

  • Knowledge about the East is generated not through actual facts, but through imagined constructs that imagined "Eastern" societies as being all fundamentally similar, all sharing crucial characteristics that are not possessed by "Western" societies.
  • This ‘a priori’ knowledge set up the East as the antithesis of the West.
  • Such knowledge is constructed through literary texts and historical records which are often limited in terms of their understanding of the actualities of life in the Middle East.

Before Said’s Orientalism:

  • "Oriental" was widely used to mean the opposite of "occidental" ('western'). The comparisons were generally unfavorable to the former, but respected institutions like the Oriental Institute of Chicago, the London School of Oriental and African Studies or Università degli studi di Napoli L'Orientale, carried the term with no explicit reproach.

After Said’sOrientalism:

  • The word "Orient" fell into disrepute after the word "Orientalism" was coined. Following Michel Foucault, Said emphasized the relationship between power and knowledge in scholarly and popular thinking, in particular regarding European views of the IslamicArab world. Said argued that Orient and Occident worked as oppositional terms, so that the "Orient" was constructed as a negative inversion of Western culture.
  • Had far-reaching implications beyond area studies in Middle East, to studies of imperialist Western attitudes to India, China and elsewhere.
  • One of the foundational texts of postcolonial studies. Said later developed and modified his ideas in his book Culture and Imperialism (1993).

Said puts forward several definitions of 'Orientalism' in the introduction to Orientalism. Some of these have been more widely quoted and influential than others:

  • "A way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient's special place in European Western experience." (p. 1)
  • "a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between 'the Orient' and (most of the time) 'the Occident'." (p. 2)
  • "A Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient." (p. 3)
  • "...particularly valuable as a sign of European-Atlantic power over the Orient than it is as a veridic discourse about the Orient." (p. 6)
  • "A distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts." (p. 12)

In his Preface to the 2003 edition of Orientalism, Said also warned against the "falsely unifying rubrics that invent collective identities," citing such terms as "America," "The West," and "Islam," which were leading to what he felt was a manufactured "clash of civilisations."

Criticisms of Said

HistorianBernard Lewis:

  • Said's account contains many factual, methodological and conceptual errors.
  • Said ignores many genuine contributions to the study of Eastern cultures made by Westerners during the Enlightenment and Victorian eras.
  • Said's theory does not explain why the French and English pursued the study of Islam in the 16th and 17th centuries, long before they had any control or hope of control in the Middle East.
  • Said has ignored the contributions of Italian, Dutch, and particularly the massive contribution of German scholars.
  • Lewis argued that Orientalism arose from humanism, which was distinct from Imperialist ideology, and sometimes in opposition to it. Orientalist study of Islam arose from the rejection of religious dogma, and was an important spur to discovery of alternative cultures.
  • Lewis criticised as "intellectual protectionism" the argument that only those within a culture could usefully discuss it.

Said’s rebuttal:

  • must be placed into its proper context.
  • Lewis' critique of his thesis could hardly be judged in the disinterested, scholarly light that Lewis would like to present himself, but must be understood in the proper knowledge of (what Said claimed) was Lewis' own (often masked) neo-imperialist proclivities, as displayed by the latter's political or quasi-political appointments and pronouncements.Specifically, Lewis is aligned with prominent "think tanks" that promote "neoconservative" views on U.S. Middle East Policy

Bryan Turner’s critique:

  • There were a multiplicity of forms and traditions of Orientalism.
  • Critical of Said’s attempt to try to place them all under the framework of the orientalist tradition.

Other critics:

  • While many distortions and fantasies certainly existed, the notion of "the Orient" as a negative mirror image of the West cannot be wholly true because attitudes to distinct cultures diverged significantly.
  • a logical necessity that other cultures will be identified as "different", since otherwise their distinctive characteristics would be invisible, and that the most striking differences will hold up the mirror to the observing culture
  • the criticisms levied by Said at Orientalist scholars of being essentialist can in turn be levied at him for the way in which he writes of the west as a hegemonic mass, stereotyping its characteristics.

Orientalism: Summary

  • Alldiscourse, particularly discourse about other cultures, is inherently ideological -- regardless of the subject any historical discourse must be situated within a particular framework whose overall structure is necessarily ideological -- Said situates his argument in the realm of Orientalism, particularly the academic study and political and literary discourse surrounding Arabs, Islam and the Middle East that originated primarily in England and France and later the United States.
  • this discourse actually creates (rather than examines or describes) a palpable divide between East and West -- this divide situates the West as a superior culture to the East --This became politically useful for colonization
  • The discourse surrounding these countries is coded by a superiority that is not necessarily reflected in the realities of the concerned countries. –Thereforethe study of someplace called the "Orient" and of some people known as "Arabs" fails to take into account the reality of the area as being the same place as the West (i.e., part of the Earth).

Said summarized his work in these terms: