Page 236 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes it more circumspectly, the great likelihood that ideas about the Orient drawn from Orientalism
can be put to political use, is an important yet extremely sensitive truth. It raises questions about
the predisposition towards innocence or guilt, scholarly disinterest or pressure-group complicity,
in such fields as black or women's studies. It necessarily provokes unrest in one's conscience about
cultural, racial, or historical generalizations, their uses, value, degree of objectivity, and fundamental
intent. More than anything else, the political and cultural circumstances in which Western
Orientalism has flourished draw attention to the debased position of the Orient or Oriental as an
object of study. Can any other than a political master--slave relation produce the Orientalized
Orient perfectly characterized by Anwar Abdel Malek?
1. On the level of the position of the problem, and the problematic . . . the Orient and Orientals
[are considered by Orientalism] as an 'object' of study, stamped with an otherness -- as all that
is different, whether it be 'subject' or 'object' -- but of a constitutive otherness, of an essentialist
character. . . . This 'object' of study will be, as is customary, passive, non- participating,
endowed with a 'historical' subjectivity, above all, non-active, non-autonomous, nonsovereign
with regard to itself: the only Orient or Oriental or 'subject' which could be admitted, at the
extreme limit, is the alienated being, philosophically, that is, other than itself in relationship to
itself, posed, understood, defined -- and acted -- by others.
2. On the level of the thematic, [the Orientalists] adopt an essentialist conception of the countries,
nations and peoples of the Orient under study, a conception which expresses itself through a
characterized ethnist typology . . . and will soon proceed with it towards racism.
According to the traditional orientalists, an essence should exist - sometimes even clearly described
in metaphysical terms -- which constitutes the inalienable and common basis of all the beings
considered; this essence is both 'historical,' since it goes back to the dawn of history, and
fundamentally a-historical, since it transfixes the being, 'the object' of study, within its inalienable
and non-evolutive specificity, instead of defining it as all other beings, states, nations, peoples,
and cultures -- as a product, a resultant of the evection of the forces operating in the field of
historical evolution.
Thus one ends with a typology -- based on a real specificity, but detached from history, and,
consequently, conceived as being intangible, essential - which makes of the studied 'object' another
being with regard to whom the studying subject is transcendent; we will have a homo Sinicus, a
homo Arabicus (and why not a homo Aegypticus, etc.), a homo Africanus, the man -- the 'normal
man,' it is understood -- being the European man of the historical period, that is, since Greek
antiquity. One sees how much, from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, the hegemonism of
possessing minorities, unveiled by Marx and Engels, and the anthropocentrism dismantled by
Freud are accompanied by europocentrism in the area of human and social sciences, and more
particularly in those in direct relationship with non-European peoples. Abdel Malek sees
Orientalism as having a history which, according to the 'Oriental' of the late twentieth century, led
it to the impasse described above. Let us now briefly outline that history as it proceeded through
the nineteenth century to accumulate weight and power, 'the hegemonism of possessing minorities',
and anthropocentrism in alliance with Europocentrism. From the last decades of the eighteenth
century and for at least a century and a half, Britain and France dominated Orientalism as a
discipline. The great philological discoveries in comparative grammar made by Jones, Franz Bopp,
Jakob Grimm, and others were originally indebted to manuscripts brought from the East to Paris
and London. Almost without exception, every Orientalist began his career as a philologist, and the
revolution in philology that produced Bopp, Sacy, Burnouf, and their students was a comparative
science based on the premise that languages belong to families, of which the Indo-European and
the Semitic are two great instances. From the outset, then, Orientalism carried forward two traits:
1. a newly found scientific self-consciousness based on the linguistic importance of the Orient to
Europe, and
2. a proclivity to divide, subdivide, and redivide its subject matter without ever changing its
mind about the Orient as being always the same, unchanging, uniform and radically peculiar
object.

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