As I sit here and gaze at what must be my fifth or sixth tattered copy of Edward Said’s Orientalism—it is almost time to order yet another—I find it difficult to underestimate how profoundly this work of cultural criticism has altered my lives. ‘Yes,’ odd as it may seem, the plural ‘lives’ is deliberate. On the one hand, my first encounter with Orientalism during my senior year in college (egads, has it been that long?) began the process of restructuring my academic interests by problematizing nearly all of the ‘knowledge’ of the Ancient Near East I presumed to have learned, a constant and welcome challenge over the course of my graduate work and professional life as an archaeologist. On the other hand, Orientalism served and continues to serve as a touchstone for my political life (such as it is) by informing my interests in documenting the origins, manifestations and rationalizations of Islamophobia and anti-Arab bigotry in our contemporary political discourse. Orientalism is thus for me a kind of gadfly: an enduring provocation to think critically about the vexing relationships between present and past, between West and East, between academia and politics as well as between the professional and the personal.
It would be beyond reason to attempt to treat comprehensively in the format of a diary either the arguments and criticisms contained within Orientalism or the reception to the work, positive and negative, since it was first published in 1978. All I can do here is provide some broad contours, relate how this book changed my life/lives and hope that I've piqued in you an interest to engage or re-engage a work of scholarship which I rank among the most significant of the late twentieth century.
What, then, does Said mean when he refers to the concept of ‘Orientalism’?
Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient. (E. Said. Orientalism. 25th Anniversary Edition. Vintage, 2003: 3)
What Said is describing—and this description is substantiated over the course of the entire work—is the emergence in the nineteenth century and subsequent codification of a Western (European in origin but eventually North American as well) perspective on the East, particularly the region of the broader Middle East including North Africa. Two primary factors converged to draw European attention to the Middle East. First, European capitals were, since the last quarter of the eighteenth century, wrestling with the ‘Eastern Question’: the set of political, economic and military issues surrounding what was perceived to be the slow yet inevitable demise of the Ottoman Empire. Information regarding the territories and populations within the Empire was thus essential from a policy-perspective as each capital intended to maintain, if not expand, influence in the region. Second, the territories and populations within the Empire were becoming increasingly accessible to European exploration, both casual and scientific. The products of these explorations were diverse: cultural geographies, historical treatises, linguistic studies, ethnographies, records of archaeological fieldwork, historical fiction, poetry, paintings, illustrations and more. By the middle of the nineteenth century the East had become, in effect, an object of Western policy-formulation, scientific knowledge and popular fascination.
Now, where Said’s treatment of Orientalism is provocative and in my opinion most powerful is in his recognition of the symbiosis among policy, science and popular public imagination, what Said denotes above as ‘the corporate institution.’ The core notions binding these three realms were: 1) the fundamental otherness or exoticism of the East, an otherness essentialized to the opposition of Eastern stasis versus Western vitality; 2) the natural and scientifically demonstrable superiority of the latter over the former; and 3) the privileged position of the Western construct of the East over actual Eastern narratives of their own cultural histories. Orientalism was in essence a Western cultural project to appropriate the East, a manifestation less of substantive knowledge of the East than of the production of knowledge to justify a will to govern the East.
Let me boil all of this down to a single statement: we are the inheritors of a two-century project to manufacture an idea of a naturally and necessarily inferior East in order to rationalize the exercise of Western power upon the East.
Now, if anyone has stuck with me to this point then allow me to explain how Said’s central idea changed my life/lives. As I said in the introduction, I first read Orientalism (well, excerpts from the book) during my senior year in college. I think the only word I can use to describe my first reaction to Said’s sweeping critiques and indictments is ‘discomfort.’ At that point, I was not yet really clued into the body of writings on theory and method, of which Orientalism is a part, indicative of ‘the reflexive turn’ in the Humanities and Social Sciences out of which emerged a critical debate concerning objectivity and a recognition of the problematic relationship of knowledge and power.
So, off I went to start my graduate work and ever so slowly I came to realize just how much of the accumulated knowledge in my area of interest—the eastern Mediterranean world of the second and first millennia BCE—could be traced back to the quasi-scientific opinions of a handful of European literati working from roughly 1860 through to the 1930s. In other words, conventional wisdom about the historical cultures in the region was formulated in the context of Western colonial interests from the time of the expedition dispatched by Napoleon III to Syria and the Lebanon in 1860 through the period of the Mandates. (I began at that point to re-read Orientalism with some frequency and stash a copy in my backpack at all times, a habit I should probably be ashamed to admit I still continue.) Once one begins to interrogate how these literati knew what they presumed to know, the symbiosis of scientific knowledge and politics becomes clear: Eastern stasis was assumed, allowing for the assignment of stereotypical representations of modern Arab populations to ancient populations, as well as the assignment of negative traits discovered in ancient texts to the modern Arab population. The present was made past, and the past was made present, with an evident intention to justify colonial domination of static and inferior peoples. More pernicious still was the mid-nineteenth-century construction of the ethno-linguistic categories of ‘Semite’ and ‘Indo-European/Aryan’ and their ahistorical quasi-scientific application to ancient and modern populations alike. Orientalism in practice, with dark consequences indeed.
Of course, my interests in tracing the effects of Orientalist thought in a narrow area of archaeological thought is but one of my lives. Many of the observations and criticisms within Orientalism speak to the resilience of Islamophobia and anti-Arab bigotry in our contemporary political discourse. There is a largely unspoken and widely-held belief that the stereotypical and overwhelmingly negative images we in the West have constructed of Islam, of Muslims and of Arabs in the broader Middle East and North Africa are somehow more accurate knowledge than what we would gain from indigenous voices and texts. There remains an abiding distrust of Muslims and Arabs speaking for themselves. In many ways, the Middle East and North Africa remain a spectacle to the Western gaze: exotic, backwards, inferior, and subject to our voyeurism as object rather than our empathy as common humanity. Our view of Islam is often of a religion and culture forever fixed in time, rigidly incapable of change. Our view of Islam is also overwhelmingly political, not in the sense that right-wing bigots intend when they blather on hypocritically about ideology and Sharia, but in the sense that the caricature of Islam we have created, and largely maintain, is expedient for our political culture.
This, finally, is how Orientalism has changed my political life. I find myself spending quite a bit of time thinking and writing about Islamophobia and anti-Arab bigotry in our contemporary political discourse, focusing not only on the overt instances of right-wing bigotry but also on the biases inherent to the ‘corporate institution’ we have inherited. These are deep and pervasive biases, but I believe it is incumbent upon us to combat them. Each re-reading of this book also affirms a signal change in my perspective on what I have come to recognize as a wholly artificial divide between aspects of a single life: professional career, the personal, the political. I'm not ashamed at all to be a part of that 'liberal bias' in academia so decried by the political right.
Now, I'll be among the first to admit that Orientalism isn't perfect. Some of the examples which Said cites are overstated, while other citations which might have strengthened some of his points were overlooked. 'Yes,' I am familiar with many of the works critical of Orientalism, of Said's other works (I recommend highly Culture and Imperialism) and of Said himself; and 'yes,' I am aware that Said's work has motivated, at least in part, some fairly crankish historical revisionism. I nevertheless find this book to be of fundamental significance as we wrestle with both the realities and fictions of our modern encounter with the Middle East and as we confront the web of institutional biases which unconsciously inform our views of 'the other.'
Many thanks to aravir for offering this slot in 'Books That Changed My Life' and many thanks to the readers who stuck it out to the end. I hope that I may have managed to pique your interest!