Interview of Edward Said on Orientalism
" Orientalism " is a text by Edward Said in which he discussed about the Cultural norms of East and the West. Let us see first the brief introduction about Author.
Edward Said :-
The central argument of Orientalism is that the way that we acquire this knowledge is not innocent or objective but the end result of a process that reflects certain interests.
That is, it is highly motivated. Specifically Said argues that the way the West, Europe and the U.S. looks at the countries and peoples of the Middle East is through a lens that distorts the actual reality of those places and those people. He calls this lens through which we view that part of the world Orientalism, a framework that we use to understand the unfamiliar and the strange; to make the peoples of the Middle East appear different and threatening. Professor Said's contribution to how we understand this general process of what we could call stereotyping has been immense. The aim of this program is to explore these issues through an interview with him. He starts by discussing the context within which he conceived Orientalism. Edward Said put two reasons :-
♧ it was an
immediate thing, that is to say, the Arab-Israeli War of 1973, which had been preceded
by a lot of images and discussions in the media in the popular press about how the
Arabs are cowardly and they don't know how to fight and they are always going to be
beaten because they are not modern. And then everybody was very surprised when the
Egyptian army crossed the canal in early October of 1973 and demonstrated that like
anybody else they could fight. That was one immediate impulse.
♧ And the second one, which has a much longer history in my own life was the constant
sort of disparity I felt between what my experience of being an Arab was, and the
representations of that that one saw in art.
There are many points in this interview video. Here I would like to share brief summary of each points in which Edward Said put his view about " Orientalism. "
1. THE REPERTORY OF ORIENTALISM :-
Said, said that,
"The fact that those representations of the Orient had very little to do with what I knew about my own background in life. So I decided to write the history of that."
In this point Edward Said talks about the India, Egypt and Syria. If somebody, let's say in the 1850's or 1860's in Paris or London, wished to talk about or read about India or Egypt or Syria, there would be very little chance for that person to simply address the subject, as we like to think in a kind of free and creative way. A great deal of writing had gone before and this writing was an organized form of writing, like an organized science. What I've called Orientalism. And it seemed to me that there was a kind of repertory of images that kept coming up: The sensual woman who is there to be sort of used by the man, the East as a kind of mysterious place full of secrets and monsters, you know,
“the marvels of the East,”
was a phrase that was used. And the more I looked the more I saw that this was really quite consistent with itself. It have very little to do with people who had actually been there.
And even if they had been there, there wasn't much modification. In other words you didn't get what you could call realistic representations of the Orient, either in literature or in painting or in music or any of the arts.
And this extended even further into descriptions of the Arabs by experts, people who had studied them. I noticed that even in the twentieth century some of the same images that you found in the nineteenth century amongst scholars like Edward William Lane who wrote his book on the Modern Egyptians in the early 1830's and then you read somebody in the 1920's and they more or less saying the same thing.
2. ORIENTALISM & EMPIRE :-
Professor Said's analysis of Orientalism isn't just a description of its content but a sustained argument for why it looks the way it does. It's an examination of the quite concrete, historical and institutional context that creates it. Specifically Said locates the construction of Orientalism within the history of Imperial conquest.
As empires spread across the globe historically the British and the French have been the most important in terms of the East. They conquer not only militarily but also what we could call ideologically. The question for these empires is: How do we understand the natives we are encountering so we can conquer and subdue them easier? This process of using large abstract categories to explain people who look different, whose skin is a different color, has been going on for a long time, as far back as there has been contact between different cultures and peoples. But Orientalism makes this general process more formal in that it presents itself as objective knowledge. Said identifies Napoleon's conquest of Egypt in 1798 as marking a new kind of imperial and colonial conquest, that inaugurates the project of Orientalism.
EDWARD SAID said that,
" There was a kind of break that occurred kind of after Napoleon came to Egypt in 1798. I think it's the first really modern imperial expedition. So he invades the place but he doesn't invade it the way the Spaniards invaded the New World, looking for loot. He comes instead with an enormous army of soldiers but also scientists, botanists, architects, philologists, biologists, historians, whose job it was to record Egypt in every conceivable way. And produce a kind of scientific survey of Egypt, which was designed, not for the Egyptian, but for the European. Of course what strikes you first of all about the volumes they produced, is their enormous size. They are a meter square. And all across them is written the power and prestige of a modern European country that can do to the Egyptians what the Egyptians cannot do to the French. I mean there's no comparable Egyptian survey of France. To produce knowledge you have to have the power to be there, and to see in expert ways things that the natives themselves can't see. "
♧ AMERICAN ORIENTALISM :-
The differences between different kinds of Orientalisms are in effect the differences between different experiences of what is called the Orient. I mean the difference between Britain and France on the one hand and the United States on the other, is that Britain and France had colonies in the Orient. I mean they had a long- standing relationship and imperial role in a place like India, so that there's a kind of an archive of actual experiences of being in India, of ruling in a country for several hundred years. And the same with the French in North Africa, let's say Algeria or Indochina, direct colonial experience. In the case of the Americans, the experience is much less direct. There's never been an American occupation of the Near East. So I would say the difference between British and French Orientalism on the one hand and the American experience of the Orient on the other is that the American one is much more indirect, much more based on abstractions. The second big thing, I think that differs in the American experience from the British and French of Orientalism, is that the American Orientalism is very politicized by the presence of Israel for which America is the mainally.
♧ Israel - Palestine issues :-
This issue is basically a land issue. Any religious establishment, colony, tribe or entity requires land to stay, a land which they can call 'home'. But Israel was unable to find the land anywhere in the world. At first place, there was no country such as Israel. According to James Gelvin's historical sense, in the late 19th century, the Ottoman Empire ruled over Palestine (as now we know). The language was Arabic. Ottoman Palestine was a place where people of different religions lived peacefully. Some of the Zionists, later thought that the Isreal was a state of Jews and so they settled there. So the issue of the ownership of the land kept changing. Palestine was known as Ottoman Empire and much of the Arab people residing there. But their conflict with Jewish people became more stronger. Both the Arabs and the Jews were adamant to have the land in Palestine. Many lives were lost in this conflict. West Bank and Gaza strip was remaining. Both became part of Palestine and the remaining land is now called Israel.
In this short video the major question is What if any one of these two countries drop down their weapons? In the first case if Arab led down their weapons then the both states lived in peace. Isreal wants to live in a Jewish Sate to live in peace as well as Isreal recognizes the right of Palestinians to have their own state. And the Muslim doesn't want to consider the right of Jewish people to live in the land.
In this Concluding part of this video there is discussion about the Israel-Palestine issue is now shifting from Religious Hatred to Nationalism.The issue of land where Isreal people located had witnessed tremendous exodes. Now the Saudi Arabia had made a collaboration with Isrealites to support intellectual growth and development.
♧ References :-
♧Barad, Dilip. 29 July 2016, blog.dilipbarad.com/2016/07/edward-said-on-orientalism.html. Accessed 18 Nov. 2020.
♧ Said, Edward., "Interview: Orientalism", Assistant Editor Jeremy Smith, Executive director & producer, Sut Jhally University of Massachusetts-Amherst
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