Page 257 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Unit 22: Edward Said's Crisis [In Orientalism]: Inter-Textual Analysis (Alluding Fanon, Foucaut and Bhabha

What was is that gave rise to postcolonialism? Why was it that a study of the cultural dimension Notes
of imperialism became important? First, independence movements around the world put an end
to colonialism. Yet the residual effects of imperialism continued to affect the coltures of the erstwhile
colonies. Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961) is one such intervention in colonial discourse.
By the 1980’s a substantial body of commonwealth literature had emerged in which writers tried
to make sense of the impact of colonialism. There was a greater awareness of the power relations
between the West and Third World cultures. All these led to a study and analysis of colonialism
and its after-effects.

22.1 The Holy Trinity
Said’s Orientalism which appeared in 1978 is a good starting point for us. Said sees Orientalism as
a discourse by which European culture was able to manage and even produce the orient politically,
sociologically, militarily, ideologically, socientifically and imaginatively during the post-
enlightenment period. Said states:
Taking the eighteenth century as a very roughly defined starting point, Orientalism can be defined
as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient-dealing with it by making statements about
it, describing it, by teaching it, setting it, ruling over it, in whort Orientalism as a western style for
dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient.
On page 3 itself, Said acknowledges that he had found it useful to employ Foucault’s notion of
discourse as described by him in The Archcology of Knowledge and Discipline and Punish.
A very important statement which Said makes on page 12 of Orientalism is:
Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field that is reflected passively by culture,
scholarship or institutions, nor is it a large and diffuse collection of texts about the orient nor it is
representative and expressive of a nefarious ‘Western’ imperialist plot to hold down the ‘Orient
World’. It is rather a distribution of geographical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic,
sociological and philosophical text; it is an claboration not only of a basic geographical distinction
but also a whole sense of ‘interest’...
By means of the discourse of orientalism, Westerm cultural institutions are responsible for the
creation of those ‘others’. The Orientals’ very difference from the Occident helps establish that
opposition by which Europe’s own identity can be established. The knowledge of the Orient
created by and embodied within the discourse of Orientalism serves to construct animage of the
Orient and the Orientals as subservient and subject to domination by the Occident. The knowledge
of ‘subjectraces’ or ‘Orientals’ makes their management easy and profitable.

Said’s book establishes that stereotypes and general ideology about the orient as
‘the other’ have helped to produce myths about the laziness, deceit and irrationality
of Orientals.

Knowledge of the Orient is generated out of strength and such strength-generated knowledge, in
turn, ‘creates’ the Orient, the Oriental and his/her world. In most cases the Oriental is ‘contained’
the ‘represented’ by dominating frameworks and the encoding and comparison of the orient with
the West ensures in the long run that oriental culture and perspectives are a devialion and a
perversion that justify an inferior status for the latter. The Orient is seen as essentially monolithic
with an unchanging history, while the Occident is dynamic with an active history. Not only that,
the Orient and the Oriental are seen to be passive, non-participatory ‘objects’ of study. The Orient,
in that sense, was sought to be established as a textual construct. On page 36 of his book Said
states:
Knowledge gives power, more power requires more knowledge, and so on in an increasingly
profitable dialectic of information and control. The whole thing thus becomes an on-going project.

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