CVSP 204 GENERAL LECTURE

EDWARD SAID’S ORIENTALISM (1978)

Date: Nov. 13th, 2018

Dr Syrine Hout

Professor

Department of English

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Edward Said – Edward Said – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Portrait of Edward Said by Antoun Albert

Al Ahram Weekly

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Art: Orientalism on Pinterest Harems, Deutsch and Ferdinand

Art: Orientalism The writers and painters who flooded into the Near and Middle East following the

Turkish defeat at the hands of Napoleon at the Battle of the Pyramids recorded their experiences in verse and art to become known as ‘the Orientalists’ in a movement that

spanned over a century. They traveled through Turkey, Iraq, Persia, Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, Arabia and North Africa.

A Game of Backgammon The Carpet Seller: Hali Charles Langdell – Algerian Girl

Explore Turkey: Harem:

Artist: Francesco Ballesio

Arthur von Ferraris

“The Dressing of the Favorite (1857)”

The women Slaves

Julius Victor Berger (Austrian, born 1850-1920) ‘A visitor in the Harem’

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I. Biographical Sketch of Edward Said (1935-2003)

A. Renaissance Man

B. Controversial Figure C. Born in Jerusalem, PhD from Harvard University (1964), member of the

Palestinian National Council (1977-1991), battle against leukemia, buried in Broummana.

II. Works and Legacy

A. Author of over 20 books

1. Posthumous works: From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map (2004), Parallels and

Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (with Daniel Barenboim) (2004), Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004), On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (2007)

2. Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966), Orientalism (1978), The

World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), Beginnings: Intention and the Method (1985), After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (1986), The Question of Palestine (1992), Musical Elaborations (1993), Culture and Imperialism (1994), The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination,

1969-1994 (1995), Representations of the Intellectual (1996), Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World

(1997), Out of Place: A Memoir (1999)

3. Documentary Out of Place: Memories of Edward Said (2006), The Cambridge

Introduction to Edward Said (2010), Edward Said: A legacy of Emancipation and Representation (2010), The Critical Reception of Edward Said’s “Orientalism” in the Arab World: A Critical Study (2011)

III. Major Literary-Historical Events in the Orientalist Tradition

A. Compilation and translation of the The 1001 Nights into French by Antoine Galland (1704-1717)

B. Discovery of Sanskrit by William Jones in Bengal in 1786 C. Until the middle of 18

th C, Orientalists were Biblical scholars, students of

Semitic languages, of the Koran, of the Arabic Language at European universities D. 1832: The term “Oriental Renaissance” is coined by Edgar Quintet

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IV. The Book: Orientalism

A. Its Intellectual Inheritance

Two major thinkers have influenced Edward Said’s conception of orientalism:

1. French philosopher Michel Foucault: notion of discourse, dialectical relationship between power and knowledge.

2. Italian political theorist Antonio Gramasci: hegemony

B. Its Intellectual Progency

1. Orientalsim inaugurates postcolonial Studies, is translated into over 36 languages

2. Historical and Personal Reasons for writing the book: 1967 war, anti-Arab sentiment in the US, negative images in the media

C. Connections/Parallels to Nietzsche, Freud, and Mann

1. Nietzche’s Beyond Good and Evil: binary pair of West-East: West enjoys a “foreground valuation”; Western mind is an extra simplification apparatus when viewing the Orient

-“ The Orient was orientalized”

2. Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents: the East = playground for European collective id to exercice its erotic and aggressive fantasies.

a. Paintings of sexual lasciviousness and excess (handout)

3. Mann: Orient is the conceptual equivalent of Venice for Gustav von Aschenbach in Death in Venice

a. the East = workplace for colonial equivalent, soldiers,

academicians -“East is a career”

b. main actors in Orientalism: French and British cultures and empires

(from the beginning of the 19th

C until the end of WWII ) and the US (after WWII)

- “The Orient is less a place than a topos”

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D. Main Definitions of Orientalist Discourse

1. “ a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and the ‘ the Occident”

2. “ a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient”

3. “a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly,

economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts”

E. Structure of Orientalist Discourse

1. Orientalism is divided into 3 mutually reinforcing components:

a. Academic

b. Imaginative

c. Historical/Material

2. Orientalism has two facets/faces:

d. Latent (doctrinal, unchanging, unconscious, related to content) e. Manifest (modern, changing, conscious, related to form, style, and genre/ medium)

Said that no matter how different the manifest aspect of any orientalist cultural artifact is, the ideological infrastructure is always the same, i.e.,West is superior to East.

3. The internal consistency of Orientalism is always higher than any

correspondence between the Orientalist representation and the real Orient

-“Orientalism overrode the Orient”

4. Two methodological devices to study Orientalist authority:

a. strategic location: relationship between author and text: EXTERIORIY produces ‘AUTHORITY’ over the Orient (al)

b. strategic formation: relationship between texts, principle of affiliation, intersextuality, accumulate and cautionary nature of orientalism as a system of representations

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F. Overview of Chapters

The book divided into 3 chapters:

1. The Scope of Orientalism

2. Orientalist Structures and Restructures

3. Orientalism Now

G. Reception of Orientalism 1. Praise: Talal Asad, Paul de Man

2. Criticism: Bernard Lewis, Ibn Warraq, Daniel Martin Varisco

3. Typical Points of Critique:

a. Ahistorical reading of Orientalist texts

b. No consideration of the factor of gender

c. No consideration of the factor of social class

d. Orient was not Europe’s only or even most important Other: internal ethical others (e.g. Scots, Irish, Welsh in the ُ English case)

e. Said left impact of orientalism on Orientals themselves unexamined

V. Conclusion

3 Questions to raise in class: since 1978,

1. What does representing another culture even mean in the context of 21st

-century globalism, in which the world is often described as a global village because of high-speed travel, mass migrations, and other forms of mobility?

2. Is the internet – and the social media, specifically like Facebook and twitter- a means of sharpening or reducing intolerance towards members of ‘other’ cultures, religions, political beliefs, etc.?

3. Hypothetically, if you had the chance to actually be someone whom you see as

being very different from you in cultural terms, who would be that person for 24 hours? Who would this other person be and what would you try to accomplish on

this day?

Thank you!