Name:-
Kailash Baraiya
Semester:-
03
Batch:-2016-2018
Enrollment
no:- PG2069108420170001
Submitted
to:-Smt. S.B. Gardi Dept. of English MKBU
Email id:-
kailashbaraiya21@gmail.com
Paper no:-
11, The Post – Colonial Literature
Topic:-
Introduction of Orientalism
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Introduction of Writer:-
Edward Wadie Said (1,November 1935 – 25
September 2003) was a professor of literature at Columbia University, a public intellectual, and a founder of the academic
field of postcolonial studies. A Palestinian American born in Mandatory Palestine, he was a citizen of the
United States by way of his father, a U.S. Army veteran.
Educated
in the Western canon, at British and American
schools, Said applied his education and bi-cultural perspective to illuminating
the gaps of cultural and political understanding between the Western world and
the Eastern world, especially about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in
the Middle East; his principal influences were Antonio
Gramsci, Frantz
Fanon, Aimé
Césaire, Michel
Foucault, and Theodor
Adorno.[4]
As
a cultural critic, Said is known for the
book Orientalism (1978), a critique of
the cultural representations that are the bases
of Orientalism—how the Western world perceives the
Orient. Said’s model of textual analysis transformed the
academic discourseof researchers in literary theory, literary
criticism, and Middle-Eastern studies—how academics examine,
describe, and define the cultures being studied. As a foundational
text, Orientalism was controversial among the scholars of
Oriental Studies, philosophy, and literature.
As a
public intellectual, Said was a controversial member of the Palestinian National Council,
because he publicly criticized Israel and the Arab countries, especially the
political and cultural policies of Muslim régimes who acted against the
national interests of their peoples. Said advocated the establishment of a Palestinian state to
ensure equal political and human
rights for the Palestinians in Israel, including the right
of return to the homeland. He defined his oppositional relation with
the status quo as the remit of the public intellectual who has
“to sift, to judge, to criticize, to choose, so that choice and agency return to the individual” man and woman.
In
1999, with his friend Daniel
Barenboim, Said co-founded the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra, based
in Seville, which comprises young Israeli, Palestinian, and Arab musicians.
Besides being an academic, Said also was an accomplished pianist, and,
with Barenboim, co-authored the book Parallels and Paradoxes:
Explorations in Music and Society (2002), a compilation of their
conversations about music. Edward Said died of leukemia on
25 September 2003
v
About his work ‘Oriantalism’:-
Orientalism is
a 1978 book by Edward
W. Said, about the cultural representations that are the bases of Orientalism,
defined as the West's patronizing representations of "The
East"—the societies and peoples who inhabit the places of Asia,
North Africa, and the Middle East. According to Said, orientalism (the Western
scholarship about the Eastern
World) is inextricably tied to the imperialistsocieties
who produced it, which makes much Orientalist work inherently political and
servile to power.
In the Middle East, the social,
economic, and cultural practices of the ruling Arab
élites indicate they are imperial satraps who
have internalized the romanticized "Arab
Culture" created by French, British and, later, American
Orientalists; the examples include critical analyses of the colonial literature
of Joseph Conrad, which conflates a people, a
time, and a place into a narrative of incident and adventure in an exotic land.
The critical application
of post-structuralism in the scholarship
of Orientalism influenced the development of literary
theory, cultural criticism, and
the field of Middle Eastern studies, especially regarding how
academics practice their intellectual enquiry when examining, describing, and
explaining the Middle East. The scope of Said's scholarship
established Orientalism as a foundation text in the field
of post-colonial culture studies, which examines the
denotations and connotations of Orientalism, and the history of a country's
post-colonial period.
As a public
intellectual, Edward Said debated Orientalism with historians and scholars
of area studies, notably, the historian Bernard
Lewis, who described the thesis of Orientalism as
"anti-Western".[ For subsequent editions of Orientalism,
Said wrote an "Afterword" (1995) and a "Preface" (2003) addressing
criticisms of the content, substance, and style of the work as cultural criticism.
What is Orientalism?
“Orientalism is a way of seeing that imagines, emphasizes
exaggerates and distorts differences of Arab people and culture as compared to
that of Europe and the U.S.It often involves seeing Arab culture as exotic, backward,
uncivilized and at times dangerous”
vAccording to Edward Said:
“Orientalism is the
acceptance in the west of the basic distinction between east and west as the
starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and
political accounts concerning the orient, its people, customs, mind and so on”
According to Edward Said,
Orientalism dates from the period of European enlightenment and Colonization of
the Arab World. Example of early Orientalism can be seen in European paintings
and photographs in the U.S in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Edward Said starts by
asserting the fact that orient played an instrumental role in the construction
of the European culture as the powerful of other. The orient has helped to
define Europe as its contrasting image, idea, personality experience.
v Orientalism Structures and Restructures:-
, Edward Said points the slight change in the
attitude of the Europeans towards the Orientals. The Orientals were really
publicized in the European world especially through their literary work .The
orients were presented to with the color of the oriental’s or other writers
perception Actually it was this purity of the Orientals that made them inferior
to the clever, witty, diplomatic, far-sighted European; thus it was their right
to rule and study such an innocent race. The Europeans said that these people
were too naive to deal with the cruel world, and that they needed the European
fatherly role to the Europeans gave assist them.
The Europeans
gave justification that they were meant to rule the Orientals.
Since they have developed sooner than the Orientals as a nation that shows that
they were biologically superior and second thing is that the Europeans who
discovered the orients not the orients who discovered the Europeans. Edward
then also explains how the two most renowned orient lists of the 19th century,
namely Silvestre de Saucy and Ernest Renan worked and gives rise to new
oriental’s. He says that Sacy organized the whole thing by arranging the
information in such a way that it was also useful for the future oriental.
Renan believed that the science of oriental’s and the science of philology have
a very important relation and after Renan this idea was given a lot
attention and many future orient lists worked of in its line.
v Orientalism
now:-
There was a changing
circumstance of the world politics and changing approach to oriental’s in the
20thcentury. The earlier orient lists did not interact a lot with the orients,
whereas the new orients lived with them as if they were one of them. This
wasn’t out of appreciation of their lifestyle but was to know more about the
orients in order to rule them properly.
For example: Lawrence of Arabia was one of
such orienatlists.
Oriental’s took a more
liberal stance towards most of its subjects; but Islamic oriental did not enjoy
this status. There were constant attacks to show Islam as a weak religion, and
a mixture of many religions and thoughts. Gibb was the most famous Islamic
oriental of this time.
After World War 1 the centre of
oriental’s changed from Europe to USA. All the orient lists studied the
Orientals to assist their government to come up with policies for dealing with
the orient countries. With the end of World War 2, all the Europeans colonies
were lost; and it was believed that there were no more Orientals and occidents,
but this was surely not really. Western prejudice towards eastern countries was
still tries to generalize most of the eastern countries of it.
v For example: Arabs were often represented as
cruel and violent people. Where as the Muslims were always considered to be
terrorists. This show that even with increasing globalization and awareness,
such bias was found in the people of the developed countries.
vThe distinction
between pure and political:-
Here Edward Said categorize the knowledge as,
West is that it be
nonpolitical, that scholarly, academic, impartial. The Orientalism is not a
mere political subject matter or field that is reflected passively by culture,
scholarship, or institutions; or it is a representative and expressive of some
nefarious “western” imperialist plot to hold down the “Oriental” world.
vThe Methodological
Question:-
The
Anglo-French-American experience of the Arab and Islam , which for almost a
thousand years together stood for the Orient. Immediately upon doing that a
large part of the Orient seemed to have been eliminated-India, Japan, china and
other sections of the Far East- not because these regions were not important
but because one could discuss Europe's experience of the Near Orient, or of
Islam, apart from its experience of the Far Orient.
vThe personal
dimension:-
In the
Prison Notebooks Gramsci says: “The starting point of critical elaboration is
the consciousness of what one really is, and knows thyself as a product of the
historical process to date…..” Much of the personal investment in this study
derives from my awareness of being an “Oriental "as a child growing up in
two British colonies.
v Conclusion:-
At the end of this topic it can be said that here Edward Said says
about Orientalism because he wanted to show the European-American power
to the orient and the perspective of western towards the east which has been
well elaborated by Edward Said, who concludes this chapter by saying that
European should include the perspective of Orient too.
Work Cited
<http://bharatbhammar051314.blogspot.in/2014/10/saids-idea-on-orientalism.html>.
<http://gohilhetalba052011.blogspot.in/2011/11/orientalism.html>.
said, Edward. Wikipedia.
24 September 2017 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Said>.
Said, Edward. Wikipedia.
11 9 2017. 27 10 2017 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism_(book)>.
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