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Unit 21: Edward Said’s Crisis [In Orientalism]: Detailed Study

textual analysis". Gesturing towards the Marxist Base/superstructure model, he opines, too, that Notes
there has been little serious effort to bridge the "gap between the superstructural and the base
levels in textual, historical scholarship". Said is at pains to argue that such political influences
"were productive, not unilaterally inhibiting" or restrictive. In the case of Orientalism, however,
"political imperialism governs an entire field of study, imagination and scholarly institutions - in
such a way as to make its avoidance an intellectual and historical impossibility.
In short, Said argues, nearly every nineteenth century (if not before) literary writer,
he contends, "was extraordinarily well aware of the fact of empire". It is in this light that aid views
Orientalism as a "dynamic exchange between individual authors and the large political concerns
shaped by the three great empires - British, French, American". From this point of view, Said
believes that the following "political questions" are the crucial ones:
what other sorts of intellectual, aesthetic, scholarly and cultural energies went into the making of
an imperialist tradition like the Orientalist one? How did philology, lexicography, history, biology,
political and economic theory, novelwriting and lyric poetry come to the service of Orientalism's
broadly imperialist view of the world? What changes, modulations, refinements, even revolutions
take place within Orientalism? What is the meaning of originality, of continuity, of individuality
in this context? How does Orientalism transmit or reproduce itself from one epoch to another? In
fine, how can we treat the cultural, historical phenomenon of Orientalism as a kind of willed
human work - not of mere unconditioned ratiocination - in all its historical complexity, detail and
worth without at the same time losing sight of the alliance between cultural work, political
tendencies, the state and the specific realities of domination? For Said,"humanistic study can
responsibly address itself to politics and culture" without establishing a "hard-and-fast rule about
the relationship between knowledge and politics". Each particular study must, rather, "formulate
the nature of that connection in the specific context of the study, the subject matter, and its
historical circumstances".
Self-Assessment
1. Choose the correct options:
(i) Orientalism has been translated into ............... .
(a) 20 languages (b) 85 languages
(c) 36 languages (d) none of these
(ii) Napolean’s invasions of Egypt took place in ............... .
(a) 1795 (b) 1798
(c) 1990 (d) 1985
(iii) The orient was ............... .
(a) active (b) passive
(c) both (a) and (b) (d) none of these.
21.5 Summary

• Orientalism administered a much-needed correction to the study of the Arab and Asian worlds.
Any historian, social scientist or humanist working in related fields should own a copy. The
strength of Edward Said's Orientalism is its highlighting of the underlying assumptions of
dominance and subjection in Orientalist scholarship. Said correctly points out that the British,
French and United States have relied on the reduction of the Orient to an academic study
backed by a mythical image of its inhabitants and cultures as more primitive, passionate,
mystical and illogical. Complementing this has been a presumption of Western superiority that
allows diagnosis of social ills and prescription of Western remedies for these ills.

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