Orientalism Reconsidered
Author(s): Edward W. Said
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Cultural Critique, No. 1 (Autumn, 1985), pp. 89-107
Published by: University of Minnesota Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1354282 .
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Orientalism Reconsidered
Edward W. Said
T here are two sets of problems that I'd like to take up, each of them
deriving from the general issues addressed in Orientalism, of which
the most important are: the representation of other cultures, societies,
histories; the relationship between power and knowledge; the role of
the intellectual; the methodological questions that have to do with the
relationships between different kinds of texts, between text and con-
text, between text and history.
I should make a couple of things clear at the outset, however. First of
all, I shall be using the word "Orientalism" less to refer to my book
than to the problems to which my book is related; moreover, I shall be
dealing, as will be evident, with the intellectual and political territory
covered both by Orientalism (the book) as well as the work I have done
since. This imposes no obligation on my audience to have read me
since Orientalism; I mention it only as an index of the fact that since writ-
ing Orientalism I have thought of myself as continuing to look at the
problems that first interested me in that book but which are still far
from resolved. Second, I would not want it to be thought that the
license afforded me by the present occasion is an attempt to answer my
critics. Fortunately, Orientalism elicited a great deal of comment, much
of it positive and instructive, yet a fair amount of it hostile and in some
cases (understandably) abusive. But the fact is that I have not digested
and understood everything that was either written or said. Instead, I
have grasped some of the problems and answers proposed by some of
my critics, and because they strike me as useful in focussing an argu-
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90 Edward W. Said
ment, these are the ones I shall be taking into account in the comments
that follow. Others - like my exclusion of German Orientalism, which
no one has given any reason for me to have included - have frankly
struck me as superficial or trivial, and there seems no point in even re-
sponding to them. Similarly, the claims made by Dennis Porter, among
others, that I am ahistorical and inconsistent, would have more in-
terest if the virtues of consistency (whatever may be intended by the
term) were subjected to rigorous analysis; as for my ahistoricity that too
is a charge more weighty in assertion than it is in proof.
Now let me quickly sketch the two sets of problems I'd like to deal
with here. As a department of thought and expertise, Orientalism of
course refers to several overlapping domains: firstly, the changing his-
torical and cultural relationship between Europe and Asia, a relation-
ship with a 4000 year old history; secondly, the scientific discipline in
the West according to which beginning in the early 19th century one
specialized in the study of various Oriental cultures and traditions;
and, thirdly, the ideological suppositions, images, and fantasies about
a currently important and politically urgent region of the world called
the Orient. The relatively common denominator between these three
aspects of Orientalism is the line separating Occident from Orient, and
this, I have argued, is less a fact of nature than it is a fact of human pro-
duction, which I have called imaginative geography. This is, however,
neither to say that the division between Orient and Occident is un-
changing nor is it to say that it is simply fictional. It is to say-
emphatically - that as with all aspects of what Vico calls the world of
nations, the Orient and the Occident are facts produced by human
beings, and as such must be studied as integral components of the
social, and not the divine or natural, world. And because the social
world includes the person or subject doing the studying as well as the
object or realm being studied, it is imperative to include them both in
any consideration of Orientalism, for, obviously enough, there could
be no Orientalism without, on the one hand, the Orientalists, and on
the other, the Orientals.
Far from being a crudely political apprehension of what has been
called the problem of Orientalism, this is in reality a fact basic to any
theory of interpretation, or hermeneutics. Yet, and this is the first set of
problems I want to consider, there is still a remarkable unwillingness
to discuss the problems of Orientalism in the political or ethical or
even epistemological contexts proper to it. This is as true of pro-
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Orientalism Reconsidered
fessional literary critics who have written about my book, as it is of
course of the Orientalists themselves. Since it seems to me patently
impossible to dismiss the truth of Orientalism's political origin and its
continuing political actuality, we are obliged on intellectual as well as
political grounds to investigate the resistance to the politics of Orien-
talism, a resistance that is richly symptomatic of precisely what is
denied.
If the first set of problems is concerned with the problems of Orien-
talism reconsidered from the standpoint of local issues like who writes
or studies the Orient, in what institutional or discursive setting, for
what audience, and with what ends in mind, the second set of prob-
lems takes us to a wider circle of issues. These are the issues raised
initially by methodology and then considerably sharpened by ques-
tions as to how the production of knowledge best serves communal, as
opposed to factional, ends, how knowledge that is non-dominative
and non-coercive can be produced in a setting that is deeply inscribed
with the politics, the considerations. the positions, and the strategies of
power. In these methodological and moral re-considerations of Orien-
talism, I shall quite consciously be alluding to similar issues raised by
the experiences of feminism or women's studies, black or ethnic
studies, socialist and anti-imperialist studies, all of which take for their
point of departure the right of formerly un- or mis-represented human
groups to speak for and represent themselves in domains defined,
politically and intellectually, as normally excluding them, usurping
their signifying and representing functions, overriding their historical
reality. In short, Orientalism reconsidered in this wider and libertarian
optic entails nothing less than the creation of new objects for a new
kind of knowledge.
But let me now return to the local problems I referred to first. The
hindsight of authors not only stimulates in them a sense of regret at
what they could or ought to have done but did not; it also gives them a
wider perspective in which to comprehend what they did. In my own
case, I have been helped to achieve this broader understanding by
nearly everyone who wrote about my book, and who saw it - for better
or worse - as being part of current debates, conflicts, and contested
interpretations in the Arab-Islamic world, as that world interacts with
the United States and Europe. Certainly there can be no doubt that
in my own rather limited case - the consciousness of being an Orien-
tal goes back to my youth in colonial Palestine and Egypt, although the
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92 Edward W. Said
impulse to resist its accompanying impingements was nurtured in the
heady atmosphere of the post-World War II period of independence
when Arab nationalism, Nasserism, the 1967 War, the rise of the Pales-
tine national movement, the 1973 War, the Lebanese Civil War, the
Iranian Revolution and its horrific aftermath produced that extraor-
dinary series of highs and lows which has neither ended nor allowed us
a full understanding of its remarkable revolutionary impact.
The interesting point here is how difficult it is to try to understand a
region of the world whose principal features seem to be, first, that it is
in perpetual flux, and second, that no one trying to grasp it can by an
act of pure will or of sovereign understanding stand at some Archime-
dean point outside the flux. That is, the very reason for understanding
the Orient generally and the Arab world in particular was first, that it
prevailed upon one, beseeched one's attention urgently, whether for
economic, political, cultural, or religious reasons, and second, that it
defied neutral, disinterested, or stable definition.
Similar problems are commonplace in the interpretation of literary
texts. Each age, for instance, re-interprets Shakespeare, not because
Shakespeare changes, but because despite the existence of numerous
and reliable editions of Shakespeare, there is no such fixed and non-
trivial object as Shakespeare independent of his editors, the actors who
played his roles, the translators who put him in other languages, the
hundreds of millions of readers who have read him or watched perfor-
mances of his plays since the late sixteenth century. On the other hand, it
is too much to say that Shakespeare has no independent existence at
all, and that he is completely reconstituted every time someone reads,
acts, or writes about him. In fact Shakespeare leads an institutional or
cultural life that among other things has guaranteed his eminence as a
great poet, his authorship of thirty-odd plays, his extraordinary canon-
ical powers in the West. The point I am making here is a rudimentary
one: that even so relatively inert an object as a literary text is commonly
supposed to gain some of its identity from its historical moment
interacting with the attentions, judgements, scholarship, and perfor-
mances of its readers. But, I discovered, this privilege was rarely allowed
the Orient, the Arabs, or Islam, which separately or together were sup-
posed by mainstream academic thought to be confined to the fixed
status of an object frozen once and for all in time by the gaze of Western
percipients.
Far from being a defense either of the Arabs or Islam - as my book
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Orientalism Reconsidered
was taken by many to be - my argument was that neither existed
except as "communities of interpretation" which give them existence,
and that, like the Orient itself, each designation represented interests,
claims, projects, ambitions, and rhetorics that were not only in violent
disagreement, but were in a situation of open warfare. So saturated
with meanings, so overdetermined by history, religion, and politics are
labels like "Arab" or "muslim" as subdivisions of "The Orient" that no
one today can use them without some attention to the formidable
polemical mediations that screen the objects, if they exist at all, that the
labels designate.
I do not think it is too much to say that the more these observations
have been made by one party, the more routinely they are denied by
the other; this is true whether it is Arabs or Muslims discussing the
meaning of Arabism or Islam, or whether an Arab or Muslim disputes
these designations with a Western scholar. Anyone who tries to suggest
that nothing, not even a simple descriptive label, is beyond or outside
the realm of interpretation is almost certain to find an opponent saying
that science and learning are designed to transcend the vagaries of
interpretation, and that objective truth is in fact attainable. This claim
was more than a little political when used against Orientals who dis-
puted the authority and objectivity of an Orientalism intimately allied
with the great mass of European settlements in the Orient. At bottom,
what I said in Orientalism had been said before me by A.L. Tibawi, by
Abdullah Laroui, by Anwar Abdel Malek, by Talal Asad, by S.H.
Alatas, by Fanon and Cesaire, by Pannikar, and Romila Thapar, all of
whom had suffered the ravages of imperialism and colonialism, and
who, in challenging the authority, provenance, and institutions of the
science that represented them to Europe, were also understanding
themselves as something more than what this science said they
were.
Nor was this all. The challenge to Orientalism and the colonial era of
which it is so organically a part was a challenge to the muteness
imposed upon the Orient as object. Insofar as it was a science of incor-
poration and inclusion by virtue of which the Orient was constituted
and then introduced into Europe, Orientalism was a scientific move-
ment whose analogue in the world of empirical politics was the Orient's
colonial accumulation and acquisition by Europe. The Orient was
therefore not Europe's interlocutor, but its silent Other. From roughly
the end of the eighteenth century, when in its age, distance, and rich-
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94 Edward W. Said
ness the Orient was re-discovered by Europe, its history had been a
paradigm of antiquity and originality, functions that drew Europe's
interests in acts of recognition or acknowledgement but from which
Europe moved as its own industrial, economic, and cultural develop-
ment seemed to leave the Orient far behind. Oriental history - for
Hegel, for Marx, later for Burkhardt, Nietzsche, Spengler, and other
major philosophers of history - was useful in portraying a region of
great age, and what had to be left behind. Literary historians have
further noted in all sorts of aesthetic writing and plastic portrayals that
a trajectory of "Westering," found for example in Keats and Holderlin,
customarily saw the Orient as ceding its historical preeminence and
importance to the world spirit moving westwards away from Asia and
towards Europe.
As primitivity, as the age-old antetype of Europe, as a fecund night
out of which European rationality developed, the Orient's actuality
receded inexorably into a kind of paradigmatic fossilization. The
origins of European anthropology and ethnography were constituted
out of this radical difference, and, to my knowledge, as a discipline
anthropology has not yet dealt with this inherent political limitation
upon its supposedly disinterested universality. This, by the way, is one
reason Johannes Fabian's book, Time and The Other: How Anthropology
Constitutes Its Object is both so unique and so important; compared, say,
with the standard disciplinary rationalizations and self-congratulatory
cliches about hermeneutic circles offered by Clifford Geertz, Fabian's
serious effort to re-direct anthropologists' attention back to the dis-
crepancies in time, power, and development between the ethnograph-
er and his/her constituted object is all the more remarkable. In any
event, what for the most part got left out of Orientalism was precisely
the very history that resisted its ideological as well as political encroach-
ments, and this repressed or resistant history has returned in the
various critiques and attacks upon Orientalism, which has uniformly
and polemically been represented by these critiques as a science of
imperialism.
The divergences between the numerous critiques made of Orien-
talism as ideology and praxis, at least so far as their aims are concerned,
are very wide nonetheless. Some attack Orientalism as a prelude to
assertions about the virtues of one or another native culture: these are
the nativists. Others criticize Orientalism as a defense against attacks
on one or another political creed: these are the nationalists. Still others
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Orientalism Reconsidered
criticize Orientalism for falsifying the nature of Islam: these are, grosso
modo, the fundamentalists. I will not adjudicate between these claims,
except to say that I have explicitly avoided taking stands on such mat-
ters as the real, true, or authentic Islamic or Arab world, except as
issues relating to conflicts involving partisanship, solidarity, or sym-
pathy, although I have always tried never to forsake a critical sense or
reflective detachment. But in common with all the recent critics of
Orientalism I think that two things are especially important - one, a
rigorous methodological vigilance that construes Orientalism less as a
positive than as a critical discipline and therefore makes it subject to
intense scrutiny, and two, a determination not to allow the segregation
and confinement of the Orient to go on without challenge. My own
understanding of this second point has led me to the extreme position
of entirely refusing designations like "Orient" and "Occident," but
this is something I shall return to a little later.
Depending on how they construed their roles as Orientalists, critics
of the critics of Orientalism have either reinforced the affirmations of
positive power lodged within Orientalism's discourse, or much less
frequently alas, they have engaged Orientalism's critics in a genuine
intellectual exchange. The reasons for this split are self-evident: some
have to do with power and age, as well as institutional or guild defen-
siveness; others have to do with religious or ideological convictions.
All, irrespective of whether the fact is acknowledged or not, are political
- something that not everyone has found easy to acknowledge. If I
may take use of my own example, when some of my critics in particular
agreed with the main premises of my argument they tended to fall back
on encomia to the achievements of what one of their most dis-
tinguished individuals, Maxime Rodinson, called "la science orien-
taliste." This view lent itself to attacks on an alleged Lysenkism lurking
inside the polemics of Muslims or Arabs who lodged a protest with
"Western" Orientalism, despite the fact that all the recent critics of
Orientalism have been quite explicit about using such "Western" cri-
tiques as Marxism or structuralism in an effort to override invidious
distinctions between East and West, between Arab and Western truth,
and the like.
Sensitized to the outrageous attacks upon an august and formerly
invulnerable science, many accredited members of the certified pro-
fessional cadre, whose division of study is the Arabs and Islam, have
disclaimed any politics at all, while pressing a vigorous, but for the
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96 Edward W. Said
most part intellectually empty and ideologically intended, counter-
attack. Although I said I would not respond to critics here, I need to
mention a few of the more typical imputations made against me so that
you can see Orient
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