Edward Said's Orientalism argued that Western scholarship about the East served empire
In 1978 the literary critic Edward Said took an old word for the academic study of Asia and North Africa and turned it into an accusation. Orientalism, he argued, was less a neutral field of learning than a habit of mind that painted the East as exotic and inferior, and so helped justify ruling it.
Said's case was that knowledge is never pure; it always carries the standpoint of whoever produces it. French and British writers had built up an idea of the Orient from the 18th century, and Americans inherited it in the 20th. Novels, travel writing, philology and history, in his account, spread the same assumptions: that Eastern societies were irrational, despotic and backward, and that progress meant adopting Western ideas. He examined figures such as Gustave Flaubert, and noted how obsessively Western authors cast Eastern women as either pure or fallen.
A central complaint was that the Orient was described almost wholly from texts, many written by outsiders, while people living there were treated as unable to speak credibly for themselves. Even sympathetic and learned scholars, he held, could not escape the fact of colonial rule; an Englishman interested in nineteenth-century India or Egypt never quite forgot they were British possessions. Said traced the pattern back to Aeschylus's play The Persians of 472 BC, which celebrated the Greek win at Salamis.
He also wrote that, for many in the United States, Arabs and Muslims had been reduced to two roles, oil suppliers or potential terrorists, crude caricatures that made their world easier to attack. The Yom Kippur War and the OPEC oil embargo of 1973 were fresh memories when the book appeared, and both had jolted Western assumptions about supposedly weak nations.
The book became a founding text of post-colonial studies and reshaped literary theory and Middle Eastern studies. It also drew fierce objections: the historian Bernard Lewis called its thesis anti-Western, and the two men argued publicly. Said answered critics in an Afterword in 1995 and a Preface in 2003. Late in life he argued that representation itself is unavoidable, as basic as language, but that it should be participatory rather than imposed.
Source: Orientalism (book)
