Page 259 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

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

To Said, the imperialist politics and aesthetics which Heart of Darkness embodies was in the closing Notes
years of the nineteenth century an aesthetics, politics and epistemology which were almost
unavoidable and inevitable. The strength of Said’s reading in this case is in his balancing of the
aesthetic and the political. That is something which one cannot say about the reaction of someone
like Chinua Achebe who saw Heart of Darkness as ‘out and out’ a racist book.
In the same vein Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (which does not figure in your course) is seen by Said as
a great document of its aesthetic moment, the realization of a great and cumulative process,
which, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, is reaching its last major moment before
India’s independence; on the one hand, surveillance and control over India: on the other, love for
and fascinated attention to its every detail (Culture and Imperialism, P. 195)
These kinds of readings are more open than those which merely refute, challenge and oppose.
Most ‘high modernist’ text deserve and demand a reading of that kind in view of their complexity
and of the irony that mostly goes into their making.
The general characteristic of reading in postcolonial criticism is that a text is ‘read back’ from the
perspective of the colonized. Such reading characyteristically rejects the claims to universalism
made on behalf of canonical Western literature and seeks to show its limitations of outlook especially
its general inability to empathize across boundaries of cultural and ethnic difference.
22.3 Foucault’s Concept of Discourse

The mechanism which Edward W. Said deploys in order to set his concept of Orientalism in
motion relies on Foucault's concept of discourse or discursive representation, which allows Said to
talk about Orientalism as a body of texts that operates through a network of textual referentiality.
Said also relies on Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony, to explain power-differentials between
the East and the West. Orientalism gains power through the superiority of the hegemonic culture.
The subjugation of the East is achieved not only by direct coercion but also by partial representation
through a collection of texts-ranging from travel writings, novels, translations, religious tracts and
historical documents to laws and codes-whose coherent density is able to claim the power to
represent the East and, to a certain extent, becomes sufficient to speak on behalf of the East
without the East speaking for itself. However, Orientalism has faced a number of criticisms in
recent decades. Some of the major attacks have come from David Kopf (1980, reprinted 2000), who
sees Orientalism as lacking historical reality; Michael Richardson (1990, reprinted 2000), who
attacks Orientalism for the absence of a reciprocal relationship between the East and the West; and
Sadik Jalal al-'Azm (1981, reprinted 2000), who argues that Orientalism tends to essentialise the
West in the same way that Said accuses the West of essentialising the East for imperialist ends.
Lisa Lowe (1991) questions the lack of heterogeneity in Orientalism with regard to the difference
between British and French Orientalisms.
While many of these criticisms have drawn mainly on various aspects of Orientalism, only a few
have mentioned the problem of agency in the methodology Said adopted in theorising Orientalism
(e.g. Bové 1986). Therefore, the purpose of this essay is to revisit Said's methodology and its
application to Orientalism. I will examine the impact of Said's use of Foucauldian discourse on the
notion of 'author,' or in this case the Orientalist agents. I will then explore the problem of agency
which becomes manifest as a by product of the unresolved tension between subjectivism and
objectivism defaulted in Foucauldian discourse. In light of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology, I will
critique Said's concept of the 'author' through Bourdieu's concept of habitus and assess the possibility
of reading Orientalist authors, who can, as I will argue, be treated as active cultural agents and
hence their role pertaining to a form of habitus. While Said did not refer to Bourdieu's work in his
Orientalism, his explanation of the transferable profession of the Orientalists is similar to the
concept of cultural agency advocated by Bourdieu. This paper does not intend to fill in the gap in
Said's methodology but rather to shed light on the possibility of reading Orientalism as cultural
reproduction. In fact, I will argue that Said's approach to Orientalism, to a certain degree, already
lends itself to the theory of cultural reproduction. Bourdieu's sociology, also known as 'generative
structuralism,' complements what critics view as a methodological shortcoming by shedding light

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