Edward Said

“Orientalism”

            We started our discussion of Said, and the unit on race and postcolonialism, by talking about the idea of the “post” colonial. Colonialism, or imperialism, is the term describing the relationship between dominant Western Anglo-European powers–nations like England, France, Germany, and the United States–and the geographical areas and populations these nations controlled until well into the second half of the twentieth century. Taking India and its relationship to Great Britain as our model, we talked about how, and why, the British were able to go to India, establish British models of goverment, commerce, religion, education, etc., and maintain that rule over the native populations until 1948, when India became an independent nation.

            We talked too about when the “post” in “postcolonial” appears: is it synonymous with the date on which a colonized area/people becomes an independent nation? We used the United States as an example. The geographic area which became the original United States had been colonized by the British (and French and Spanish also, but we trace our history mainly back to English colonization), and the people there considered themselves British citizens. When did the “United States” and “Americans” emerge as a separate entity? Was it on July 4, 1776, with the signing of the Declaration of Independence, which is when we celebrate our “postcolonial” beginning? We still had to fight a war with Great Britain before we had political independence. Was it when the Constitution was ratified in 1789? We still had strong economic ties to Great Britain, and in fact had to fight a second war (in 1812) to break them further. And even after that, literary critics argued that, though we had political and economic independence, we were still “ideological colonists,” because we still looked to Great Britain for most of our art, literature, and music, and founded our ideas about culture in general on a British model.

            So “colonial” status, or “postcolonial” status, is not just a matter of severing political or economic ties to a colonizing nation; it also involves uprooting all of the ideological ties that people might have to the colonizing culture. And this proves far more difficult and tricky to dislodge, since the colonizing culture has set up schools and churches–in fact, all of Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) to interpellate people into the ideologies of the colonizing culture.

            Said’s article, and the writings of most postcolonial theorists, address how this happens. How is it that a colonized people come to accept that the ways of the colonizer are “better” than their own original ways of organizing their culture? We talked about what would happen if the psychology department “invaded” the English department and announced that their ways of creating knowledge were better than ours, and forced us to think/be like them. To do so effectively, the psychology dept. would have to get us to believe that the methods of inquiry used in the psychology dept. were in fact “better” than the methods of inquiry used in the English dept. And to do this, they’d use–what else?– psychology.

            But before we got further into Said’s argument specifically, we also discussed how the idea of “race” fits with the idea of postcolonialism. I asked how do you tell what race someone belongs to? This question raised lots of responses, including the idea that even asking this question is racist. And it is. “Racism” is, in its most simple definition, making distinctions between people based on race. The question that race and postcolonial theorists ask is not whether such racism is good or bad, but rather HOW do we come to make distinctions based on race? So when I asked “how do you know what race someone belongs to,” we could point to the physical/biological traits which supposedly mark a person’s “race”: traits like eye color, eye shape, skin color, hair texture, etc. We listed these traits on the board, then got into some debate about whether “behavior” could count as a marker of race.

            The point of this discussion was to talk about how “race” (or ethnicity) is actually a signifying system, wherein certain physiological facts become signifiers connected to specific ideological signifieds. Within the system of “race,” a dark skin color becomes a signifier, and the signified it is connected to might be “athletic ability” or “musical talent.” The connections of physical signifiers to ideological signifieds in this system is “Racism”– and you can come up with your own examples of how pejorative the signifieds can be that get connected to a particular physiological signified.

            “Race,” as a genetic or biological construct, does not exist. Rather, it is a signifying system wherein physical signifiers become connected with concepts of ability to create the “meaning” of one’s “race” appearance. As in any signifying system, these connections are ARBITRARY; there is no essential or provable connection between the physical signifiers of “race” and the cultural conceptions (and misconceptions) which we assume those physical signifiers point to.

            The question for theorists of race and ethnicity, then, is HOW do these arbitrary connections between signifiers and signifieds get made, enforced, expanded, reproduced, and/or modified? The answer that most give is Foucault’s idea of DISCOURSE. Writings about race, coming from the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, psychology, criminology, biology, medicine, and (of course) literary studies connect a certain kind of eye shape with a certain kind of intelligence, or a hair texture with a social behavior. That is how “racial traits” are created, elaborated, and perpetuated. And when we have made those associations, connected certain signifiers with certain signifieds, we then view those signs of race as “real,” as “true,” as “factual.”

            The theorists of race and postcolonialism we’re reading in this unit are centrally concerned with how signifiers get connected to signifieds through discursive means to create the ordering system we call “race.” Following Foucault, Said argues that discourse works to create “knowledge” about a supposed “racial” group. The best example of this is what anthropology used to be: a discipline to create knowledge, from the perspective of the dominant (usually Western) culture, about the subordinated/colonized culture. This knowledge wielded power, as it defined and described a culture or racial group, and thus produced the social attitudes, the ideologies and practices, which surrounded and delimited the group or culture being written about.

            Said uses the word “orientalism” to refer to the set of discursive practices, the forms of power/knowledge, that Western Anglo-European cultures used to produce (and hence control) a region of the globe known as “the orient.” In class we listed some of the stereotypes associated with the word “orient” and “oriental,” all of which labeled “the orient” as a place of mystery and exoticism. Such “otherness” exists in relation to the familiarity of the Western Anglo-European world; the basis of “orientalism,” like the basis of any form of racism or ethnocentrism, is the idea that “we” are “selves” who are “familiar,” and that “others” are necessarily “exotic.”

            We also talked about the binary opposition “occident/orient,” and asked from whose perspective is “the orient” located? If “the orient” is the east, what is it east of? The answer, of course, was that it is east of the Anglo-European perspective; “the orient,” and the ideas of Eastern and Western cultures, are thus a product of the ways that Anglo-European explorers drew the map of the world from the seventeenth century onward. Said’s article quotes Giambattista Vico, who said that “men must take seriously, that what they know is what they have made, and extend it to geography.” Said expands on this idea, saying that “it is the map that engenders the territory,” and not the territory that engenders the map. In other words, maps are not just representations of a “real world” that is out there, a way to locate where rivers and mountains are. Rather, maps are TEXTS, like literary texts, which carry with them a cultural perspective, a way of constructing “reality” that has an ideological basis.

            An example of this is how the world figures time. In international time, there’s a 24-hour clock, and the Earth is divided into 24 “time zones.” Where does time begin? In Greenwich, England– 0:00 is midnight GMT, or Greenwich Mean Time, and the rest of the world measures time in relation to GMT. The same idea works with longitude: zero degrees longitude, the “starting point” of global navigation, runs just east of London.

            In both of these examples, England is the center of the world, the place where time and space begin, the starting point for all other models of mapping. And that’s because England drew the maps and created the time-measuring system. And that’s because England was the largest colonial power in the modern world (from the 18^th century to the middle of the 19^th century), and had the power to create the knowledge of the entire globe.

            Said’s article outlines how the cultural knowledge about, and representations of, “the orient” and “the oriental” constructed by the West produce “the orient” as a place of “otherness.” When we list the (racist) associations our Anglo-European culture makes with the concept of “oriental,” what we’re doing is listing all the things that our culture doesn’t want to have defining us. For example, we might hear “oriental” and think “opium-smoking, heathen, mysterious, exotic”–all terms which are negative when compared to their binary opposites: sober, Christian, known, familiar. Said argues that the West’s construction of the Orient projects all the things that the West considers negative, all the things that have to be repressed–all the things on the right-hand side of the slash in a binary opposition–onto our construct of the other, the Orient. So “the Orient” becomes the place where body (as opposed to mind), evil (as opposed to good), and the feminine (as opposed to masculine) all reside. By placing all of these forms of “otherness” on the Orient, Said says, the Occident can construct itself as all positive.

            Examples of the West’s projection of otherness onto the idea of the orient or the oriental appear all over the place in Western popular culture, from the Charlie Chan movies all the way through The Karate Kid series. The character of Mr. Miyagi represents the American assumptions about a typical Japanese man: he is asexual, has no wife or girlfriend, cultivates bonsai trees, practices martial arts, speaks in broken sentences inflected with a heavy accent (despite having lived in California for 30 years!) and has “inscrutable” behaviors, such as catching flies with chopsticks.

            In class I handed out a 19^th c. American example of Orientalism, taken from the time when Chinese immigration was at its peak after the Civil War, when American companies were importing Chinese men as a cheap labor source, particularly for building the transcontinental railroad system. The poem “The Heathen Chinee,” by Bret Harte, is a classic example of a discursive creation of the idea of the Oriental. Ah Sin in the poem is a card shark, a cheat, but smiles and smiles “inscrutably” and the Americans he plays with can’t read his expressions at all. Ah Sin does not speak, in the poem; rather, the poem is written/spoken about him, in “plain language” by “Truthful James.” The Western identity gets to speak, to produce images and ideas about the Oriental identity, which doesn’t get to talk back. On the back of that handout is another example of Orientalism, one which seems perhaps more benign than the overt racism of the poem. This passage, from an 1879 magazine, is protesting the labeling of the Chinese as “heathen Chinee” and is working to defend “the Chinese” from those negative associations. This is still an example of Orientalism, however, because this piece, even while it works to say that the Chinese are civilized and clean, is still constructing “the Chinese” as a race/national identity; it is still the West writing “the Chinese” into knowledge, rather than chinese people speaking/writing for themselves about their cultural practices and identities.

                        The history of imperialism is the history of discourses about colonized places, whether in the form of official government reports, personal travel narratives, or imaginative fiction set in “exotic” foreign lands. You might think about Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness as an example of imperial discourse–and as a novel which shows the contradictions and the collapse of imperial forms of power/knowledge. Said argues that the creation of discourse about a colonized culture, about “the other,” works also to silence that colonized culture, which cannot “talk back,” or write about itself. Rather, such discourse renders the people of the colonized culture the powerless subjects of Western power/knowledge, and anything the colonized culture tries to say or write about itself is by definition considered illegitimate, non-knowledge, nonsense.

            Postcolonial literary studies, and postcolonial theory in general, focus on what happens when the formerly colonized culture starts to, or insists on, producing its own knowledge about itself. What happens when “the empire writes back” to the dominant culture, when the silenced subjects of knowledge insist on becoming the producers of knowledge? One way to think about this is via deconstruction. The discourses that create the colonizers as the knowers and the colonized as the subjects of knowledge all depend on our old friend, the structure of binary oppositions, including West/East, Occident/Orient, civilized/native, self/other, educated/ignorant, etc. When “the empire writes back,” these binary oppositions are deconstructed; when a colonized subject insists on taking up the position of “self,” as the creator of knowledge about his/her own culture, rather than as the subject of that knowledge, these binary oppositions start to fall apart.

            In conclusion, you might want to think about contemporary Western depictions of Arab cultures as examples of Orientalism. The representations of the “Arab” serve as foundations for the ideologies, and the practices that are part of those ideologies, developed by the West. As Said says, “The hold these instruments have on the mind is increased by the institutions build around them. For every Orientalist, quite literally, there is a support system of staggering ower, considering the ephemerality of the myths that Orientalism propages. The system now culminates into the very institutions of the state. To write about the Arab Oriental world, therefore, is to write with the authority of a nation, and not with the affirmation of a strident ideology but with the unquestioning certainty of absolute truth backed by absolute force...One would find this kind of procedure less objectionable as political propaganda--which is what it is, of course--were it not accompanied by sermons on the objectivity, the fairness, the impartiality of a real historian, the implication always being that Muslims and Arabs cannot be objective but that Orientalists...writing about Muslims are, by definition, by training, by the mere fact of their Westerness. This is the culmination of Orientalism as a dogma that not only degrades its subject matter but also blinds its practitioners."”