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

structure as the discourse on which it focuses its power. It is also marked by the same rarefaction Notes
that distinguishes all discourse, which are only differentiated from one another by the motivation
that causes their respective restrictions.
Similarly, in Orientalism, discourse is described as consisting of collected statements on the Orient,
but Said adds that it operates on two principal concepts which Said calls strategic location and
strategic formation. These two terms, while they rely on discursive formation as a central theoretical
tool, reintroduce the 'author' into the analysis of power by incorporating the presence of the
author into the formation of texts: My principal methodological devices for studying authority
here are what can be called strategic location, which is a way of describing the author's position in
a text with regard to the Oriental material he writes about, and strategic formation, which is a way
of analyzing the relationship between texts and the way in which groups of texts, types of texts,
even textual genres, acquire mass, density, and referential power among themselves and thereafter
in the culture at large.
Said deploys strategic location as an extension to discourse: the author is seen as using the text to
locate his position visà- vis the Orient. By 'locating', Said is referring to the author's choice of
narrative styles, themes, images and motifs which are woven into the particular way of presenting
the Orient to the audience. This is how Orientalists construct their discourse about the faraway
land. The Orientalist narrative which Said explores at great length is the style of two French
Orientalist scholars who engaged in Arabic studies in the nineteenth century - Silvestre de Sacy
(1758-1838) and Ernest Renan (1823-1892). Said identifies two themes in Sacy's works and
approaches to studying Arabic literature: one is his endeavour to become champion of Arabic
scholarship through his various political roles, namely, as resident Orientalist at the French Foreign
Ministry (Said 1979: 124), and the other is his 'dedicated sense of pedagogic and rational utility'-
the latter theme is derived from Sacy's role as professor of Arabic at the celebrated Collège de
France and his utilitarian approach to the selection of Arabic poems in his Chrestomathie Arabe
(1806). These two themes inform Sacy's position as an Orientalist who strives to make his work
useful to the French public through his status as an Arabic specialist. Said argues that Sacy's
dedicated and utilitarian approaches to his works can be seen in texts bearing his name. As for
Renan, Said derives the theme of his Orientalism from Renan's contribution of philology to
Orientalist scholarship in France. Renan is identified as the trendsetter who imposed on the study
of Oriental languages a scientific methodology, in which language is broken down into units that
can be categorised and compared in an objective manner. In this way, Said places these authors/
Orientalists in the text, and reads their presence as a personal imprint in the text; this is the point
at which Said claims to depart from the discursive method of Foucault, to whom he admits being
greatly indebted: Yet unlike Michel Foucault, to whose work I am greatly indebted, The author in
Edward Said's "Orientalism". I do believe in the determining imprint of individual writers upon
the otherwise anonymous collective body of texts constituting a discursive formation like
Orientalism.'
For Said, individual names play an important part in providing 'labels' and links to which other
texts can refer. The example that occurs quite frequently throughout his book is how Edward
William Lane's Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836) became a major reference
for writers about the Orient such as Nerval, Flaubert and Richard Burton. Lane's authority can be
viewed as indispensable and it gives credibility to whoever cites him in their works. The image of
Egypt during the nineteenth century is therefore a product of textual referentiality, in which each
text looks to other texts for reference in terms of information and authority, through labels carrying
the names of individuals. Critiquing Said's 'Author' from Bourdieu's perspective While the author
seems to gain more presence in Said's textual analysis than in Foucault's classic discourse, the role
of the author is still limited: Said tends to treat authors as being part of the text rather than text
producers. This points to the problem of the role of agents in relation to structures, which, as Eick
points out, is not elaborated in Foucault's usage of discourse or archaeology, and the generative
function of Foucault's notion of genealogy remains largely abstract. Bourdieu sees the problem as

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