Name – Parmar Shubhda
Paper -11 (The Postcolonial Literature)
Roll no – 30
Submitted to – S.B Gardi
Department of English
MKBU
Introduction:
The Orient signifies a system of representations by political forces that brought the
Orient into Western learning, Western awareness, and Western empire. The Orient
exists for the West, and is constructed by and in relation to the West. It is a picture of
what is lower and unknown to the West.
Orientalism is ‘a way of regular writing, vision, and study, subject by
imperatives, perspectives, and ideological biases truly suited to the Orient.’
It is the picture of the ‘Orient’ expressed as an entire system of idea and
scholarship.
The Oriental is the person represented by such thinking. The man is
depicted as feminine, weak, yet extraordinarily dangerous because his sexuality
poses a danger to transparent , Western women. The woman is ready to be dominated and
control exotic. The Oriental is a single picture, a broad
generalization, and a stereotype that crosses limitless cultural and national
boundaries.
Orientalism is the unconscious, untouchable belief about what the Orient
is. Its basic content is fixed and common. The Orient is seen as separate, odd,
backward, silently different, sensual, and passive. It has a trend repression
and away from progress. Its progress and value are judged in terms of, and in
comparison to, the West, so it is always the other, the lower.
The first ‘Orientalists’ were
19th century scholars who translated the writings of ‘the Orient’ into English,
based on the theory that a truly effective colonial required knowledge of the dominated
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 scene, the observed, the object; Orientalist scholars were the students,
the observers, the subject. The Orient was passive; the West was active.
One of the most important constructions of
Orientalist scholars is that of the Orient itself. What is considered the
Orient is a vast region, one that spreads across a many of
cultures and countries. It includes most of Asia as well as the Middle East.
The picture of this single ‘Orient’ which can be studied as an organized whole
is one of the most powerful activities of Orientalist scholars. It essentialisms
an image of an ideal Oriental a
biological lower that is culturally backward, odd, and unchanging to be
depicted in dominating and sexual terms. The conversation and visual imagery of
Orientalism is laced with notions of power and authority. Formulated firstly to
facilitate a colonizing mission on the part of the West through a wide variety
of discourses and policies. The language is critical to the structure. The
feminine and weak Orient awaits the control of the West; it is a weak and dull
whole that exists for, and in terms of, it’s Western counterpart. The
importance of such a structure is that it creates a single subject matter where
none existed, a compilation of previously unspoken notions of the other. As the
notion of the Orient is created by the Orientalist, it exists only for him or
her. Its characteristics are clear by the scholar who gives it life.
Edward Said makes the claim
that the whole of Western European and American scholarship, literature, and
cultural representation and stereotype creates and reinforces intolerance
against non-Western cultures, putting them in the classification of Oriental. The
heart of the matter in understanding Orientalism is this power relationship and
how the Occident has used and continues to use and understand the Orient on its
own terms.
In the nineteenth century,
"Oriental Studies" was a part of academic study. But the West had to
create the East in order for this study to take place. Said asserts that
according to the’ Occidentals, the Orientals had no history or culture
independent of their colonial masters. Orientalism is more an indicator of the power
the West holds over the Orient, than about the Orient itself. Creating an image of the Orient and a body of knowledge
about the Orient and subjecting it to systematic study became the prototype for
taking control of the Orient. By taking control of the scholarship, the West
also took political and economic control.’
The
beginning of the study of Orientalism is early eighteenth century and focused
on language. This early study consisted of translating works from the Oriental
languages into European languages. The colonial rulers could not rule well, it
was believed, without some knowledge of the people they ruled. They think this
knowledge from translating different works from the native language into their
own. The Orient existed to be studied and that studying was done by Westerners
who believed themselves to be superior to the "others", which is how
they described the East. They were basically the opposite of the East and careful
to the active while the Orient was considered to be passive. The Orient existed
to be ruled and subject.
According to Said,’ Orientalism dates from the
period of European Enlightenment and colonization of the Arab World.
Orientalism provided a rationalization for European colonialism based on a
self-serving history in which “the West” constructed “the East” as extremely
different and inferior, and therefore in need of Western intervention or
“rescue”’.
Examples of early Orientalism can be seen in European
paintings and photographs
and also in images from the World’s Fair in the U.S. in the 19th and early 20th
centuries.
The paintings, created by European artists of
the 19th and early 20th centuries, show the Arab World as an unusual and mysterious place of sand, harems and belly dancers,
reflecting a long history of Orientalist which has continued to permeate our modern
popular culture.
The 19th
century can rightly be called the orientalist era in the arts,
as works across the range of literature and painting drew on the myth of the
Orient that was being produced by the functionaries of colonialism and the
scholars of philology. Muslim women were a particular focus of
orientalist artists. Women’s bodies are erotically on display, often, in fact, under
examination by some Arab buyer or slave seller. The exact response of a
European audience to such images is difficult to discover, but generally the
erotic construction of an Arab “other” appealed to a patriarchal sense of superiority and interest
in control.
Orientalism is a way of seeing
that imagines, emphasizes, exaggerates and distorts differences of Arab peoples
and cultures as compared to that of Europe and the U.S. It often involves
seeing Arab culture as exotic, backward, uncivilized, and at times dangerous.
Edward W. Said, in his groundbreaking book, Orientalism,
defined it as the acceptance in the West of “the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate
theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning
the Orient, its people, customs, ‘mind,’ destiny and so on.”
From the late 18th to the mid-20th
century “orientalism” remained a more or less neutral descriptive term, though
not without a cluster of both positive and negative connotations. It referred
to the linguistic and philological studies which emerged in the wake of the
great maritime voyages and discoveries, the growth of mercantilism and the
spread of European colonial power between the 16th and 19th centuries. Although
the Western study of Eastern texts and languages had been pursued since ancient
times, oriental-ism is closely associated with the birth in the 1780s of the Ideological
studies of a group of English civil servants in Bengal, working under the support
of Governor-General Warren Hastings.
Edward
Said and the Critics of Orientalism Said’s, (W.Said and Said)
‘Primary
interest lay in the Western perception and suppression of the Islamic world of
the Middle East. Since 1978 his thesis has been extended and extrapolated to
cover European interactions with the entire Asian continent. Said’s thesis,
baldly stated, is that Orientalism was a legatee of a European tradition of
“narcissistic” writing, stretching back to Homer and, in which Western
intellectuals created an “Orient” that was a fabric of “ideological fictions”
whose purpose was to confirm the West’s sense of identity and to legitimize
Western cultural and political superiority. Orientalism is a “colonizing
knowledge” which generates a series of stereotypical dichotomies between a
rational, democratic, humanistic, creative, dynamic, progressive and
“masculine” “West” and an irrational, despotic, oppressive, backward, passive,
stagnant and “feminine” “East.” In psychological terms this ideologically
charged representation of the East can be seen as the repressed “Other” of the
West, “a sort of surrogate or even underground self” associated
with the subconscious attraction-repulsion of sexual aberration and corruption,
and with a sinister “occultism”’ .
Here Said argues that, Orientalism can be
found in current Western depictions of ‘Arab’ cultures. The depictions of ‘the
Arab’ as irrational, scary, untrustworthy, anti-Western, corrupt, 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.
Edward
Said argues that the Europeans divided the world into two parts; the east and
the west or the occident and the orient or the civilized and the uncivilized.
This was totally an artificial boundary; and it was laid on the basis of the
concept of them and us or theirs and ours. The Europeans used orientalism to
define themselves. Some particular attributes were associated with the Orientals,
and whatever the Orientals weren’t the occidents were. The Europeans define
themselves as the superior race compared to the Orientals and they justified
their colonization by this concept. They said that it was their duty to the
world to civilize the uncivilized world. The main problem, however, arose when
the Europeans started generalizing the attributes they associated with Orientals,
and started portraying these artificial characteristics associated with Orientals
in their western world through their scientific reports, literary
work, and other media sources. What happened was that it created a
certain image about the Orientals in the European mind and in
doing that infused a bias in the European attitude towards the Orientals. This
prejudice was also found in the orientalists and all their scientific research and
reports were under the influence of this. The generalized attributes associated
with the Orientals can be seen even today, for example, the Arabs are defined
as uncivilized people; and Islam is seen as religion of the terrorist.
Conclusion:
Orientalism by Edward W. Said is a critique of the study of the Orient
and its ideas. Said examines the historical, cultural, and political views of
the East that are held by the West, and examines how they developed and where
they came from. He basically traces the various views and perceptions back to
the colonial period of British and European domination in the Middle East.
During this period, the United States was not yet a world power and didn't
enter into anything in the East yet. The views and perceptions that came into
being were basically the result of the British and French. The British had
colonies in the East at this time; the French did not but were trying to
acquire some.
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