Said and Orientalism
If scholars are asked about a philosopher who has been influential in post-colonial studies, Edward said
might be one on the list. As the 20 th century philosopher, Said is known to be the founder of the
aforementioned academic field not to mention his extensive critique on culture and politics in a global
scope.
Edward Said was a Palestinian American, a public intellectual who served as the professor of literature at
Columbia University. He was educated in the Western canon at British and American schools, that was
instrumental for his understanding of the cultural and political relationships between the Western world
and the Eastern world. As a Palestine himself, many of his writings mentioned about the Israeli–
Palestinian conflict in the Middle East. (Young, 1990).
His principal influences range from the modern up to 20 th century philosophers such as Hegel, Marx,
Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, and Theodor Adorno. (Curthoys and Ganguly, 2007; Hart, 2000)
Said’s first published book is the Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966), which was an
expansion of the doctoral dissertation he presented to earn the PhD degree on the school. In 1976, his
Orientalism was published and garnered popularity both from the positive and negative sides. His other
works include: The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature: Yeats
and Decolonization (1988), Culture and Imperialism (1993), Representations of the Intellectual: The
1993 Reith Lectures (1994), Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004), and On Late Style (2006). In
Orientalism (1978), Said established himself as a cultural critic, the main theme of which is false cultural
representations with which the Western world perceives the Middle East, the narratives of how The
West sees The East, he called “orientalism” the same title that the book bears.
The main argument of the Orientalism is this: that there is a "subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice
against Arabo–Islamic peoples and their culture", originating from false romanticized images of Asia and
the Middle East in particular—images that are created by the long cultural tradition of the West. For
Said, the cultural representations created by the West Such cultural representations became the source
of implicit justifications for colonial and imperial interests among the European powers and the United
States. For this reason, Said abhors such malpractices. This can be seen in the cover of the book
Orientalism (1978), a painting by Jean-Léon Gérôm during the 19 th century entitled “The Snake
Charmer.” The illustration evidently shows the “orientals” as “exotic” and “passive” contrary the
occidentals who has been traditionally depicted as “civilized.”
Image. 1. The 1978 cover of Orientalism by Edward Said, capturing the representation of the female
oriental as exotic and passive, an issue he criticized in his book. (Image Source: Wikimedia Commons
Public Domain Images)
According to Said, the way the Eastern world is culturally represented, especially the peoples and things
of the Orient, cannot be accepted as true as they intently spread by the Orientalist view. He also added
that the records of the past regarding the political and colonial domination of Europe over Asian
civilizations twists the literature of even the most knowledgeable Orientalist.
I doubt if it is controversial, for example, to say that an Englishman in India, or Egypt, in the later
nineteenth century, took an interest in those countries, which was never far from their status, in
his mind, as British colonies. To say this may seem quite different from saying that all academic
knowledge about India and Egypt is somehow tinged and impressed with, violated by, the gross
political fact—and yet that is what I am saying in this study of Orientalism.
(Introduction, Orientalism, p. 11)
References:
Young, R. (1990). White Mythologies: Writing History and the West, Routledge.
Hart, W. D. (2000). "Preliminary remarks:” Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture. Cambridge
University Press. p. 15. ISBN 9780521778107.
Curthoys, N. and Debjani Ganguly, ed. (2007). Edward Said: The Legacy of a Public Intellectual. Academic
Monographs. p. 27. ISBN 9780522853575.
Keith, W. (1 January 1999). "Edward Saïd's 'Orientalism revisited:’” The New Criterion. Internet
Archive, retrieved 16 April 2023.
