ES3206: Week 1

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ES3206 Week 1

• Race, Education the Other
• Part 1

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• Edward Said
• (1940-2003)

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Introduction

• Categorisations of the other derive from
  prehistoric distinctions between tribal groups
• To a certain extent modern and primitive
  societies seem thus to derive a sense of their
  identities negatively Yet often the sense in
  which someone feels himself to be not-foreign is
  based on a very unrigorous idea of what is out
  there, beyond ones own territory. All kinds of
  suppositions, associations, and fictions appear
  to crowd the unfamiliar space outside ones
  own. (Said, 1978, p.53)
• In the late C18th/early C19th the term race
  came to refer to discrete categories of people
  defined according to their physical
  characteristics
• Great Chain of Being Darwin
• Oriental-European relationship was determined
  by an unstoppable European expansion in search
  of markets, resources and colonies,
  Orientalism had completed its self-metamorphosis
  from a scholarly discourse to an imperial
  institution. (Said, 1978. p.95)
• Language and race seemed inextricably tied
  Aryans were confined to Europe and the ancient
  Orient the Aryan myth dominated historical and
  cultural anthropology at the expense of the
  lesser peoples. (Said, 1978, p.99)

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Introduction

• Modern theories of race located within the
  intellectual and social transformation associated
  with the Enlightenment
• Impact of European exploration, expansion,
  slavery, colonisation and imperial domination on
  ideas about race
• What do each of these mean to you?
• Slavery
• Colonisation
• Imperialism

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Constructing the Other

• The combination of Enlightenment philosophy,
  philology and comparative linguistics, the growth
  in scientific reasoning, and European expansion
  is argued by race theorists to be closely
  associated with notions of the Other
• Saids concept of Orientalism is often presented
  as the classic version of how the Other is
  constructed in popular ideas about race.
• The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe it
  is also the place of Europes greatest and
  richest and oldest colonies, the source of its
  civilizations and languages, its cultural
  contestant and one of its deepest and most
  recurring images of the Other. (Said, 1978,
  p.1)

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Orientalism

• Later we will examine the ways in which
  contemporary constructions of racial categories
  have derived in part from the American experience
  of Orientalising its others. At the time
  Orientalism was first written, Said identified
  American understanding of the Orient as
  considerably less dense and nuanced than European
  understandings
• Do you think this might still be true? If so, why
  do you imagine this is the case?

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Orientalism

• Orientalism is a system of scientific truths.
  Truth delimits all other modes of discourse
• It is therefore correct that every European,
  in what he could say about the Orient, was
  consequently a racist, an imperialist, and
  almost totally ethnocentric. (Said, 1978,
  pp.203)
• The attribute of being Oriental overrode
  any countervailing instance. An Oriental man was
  first an Oriental and only second a man (Said,
  1978, p.231)

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Orientalism

• The Orient, like the West has no ontological
  stability. These supreme fictions have the
  same status we would ascribe to race, and like
  race lend themselves easily to manipulation
  and the organisation of collective passion. In
  our time this translates into the mobilisation
  of fear, hatred, disgust and resurgent self-pride
  and arrogance much of it having to do with
  Islam and the Arabs on one side, we Westerners
  on the other (Said, 2003c, p.xii)
• For a European or American studying the Orient
  there can be no disclaiming the main
  circumstances of his actuality that he comes up
  against the Orient as European or American
  first, and as an individual second. (Said, 1978,
  p.11)
• Whilst we might want to acknowledge that the
  student of the Orient can never entirely deny
  their position, would we thereby want to allow
  that position determining power?

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Orientalism

• No consciously organised or direct manipulation
  of the Wests understanding of the non-Western
  world, but factors have fortuitously combined to
  create a particular worldview which advantages
  the West. Thus, his reference to the systematic
  discipline
• Without examining Orientalism as a discourse
  one Cannot possibly understand the enormously
  systematic discipline by which European culture
  was able to manage and even produce the
  Orient politically, sociologically, militarily,
  scientifically, and imaginatively during the
  post-Enlightenment period. (Said, 1978 p.3)

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Orientalism

• What we must try to grasp is the sheer
  knitted-together strength of Orientalist
  discourse, its very close ties to the enabling
  socio-economic and political institutions, and
  its redoubtable durability. Orientalism,
  therefore, is not an airy European fantasy about
  the Orient, but a created body of theory and
  practice in which, for many generations, there
  has been considerable material investment.
  Continued investment made Orientalism, as a
  system of knowledge about the Orient, an accepted
  grid for filtering through the Orient into
  Western consciousness, just as the same
  investment multiplied indeed, made truly
  productive the statements proliferating out
  from Orientalism into the general culture.
  (Said, 1978 p. 6)

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Orientalism

• Orientalism is, in part,
• a certain will or intention to understand, in
  some cases to control, manipulate, even
  incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or
  alternative and novel) world it is, above all a
  discourse that is, by no means in direct,
  corresponding relationship with power in the raw,
  but is rather produced and exists in an uneven
  exchange with various kinds of power (Said,
  1978, p.12)
• also
• a dynamic exchange between individual authors
  and the large political concerns shaped by the
  three great empires British, French, American
  in whose intellectual territory the writing was
  produced. (Said, 1978, pp.14-15)

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Power-knowledge

• The peculiar power and authority of
  Orientalization does not reside in what lies
  hidden within a text, but in its surface
  Orientalism relies on exteriority, an ability to
  reveal the Orient and render its mysteries plain
  for the West.
• The text is meant to indicate that the
  Orientalist is outside of the Orient, as a moral
  and existential fact. The Orient is transformed
  from a very distant otherness into some figures
  which are more or less familiar.
• We find in this explanation the core of the
  authority of many, less subtly racialising
  discourses the BNP leaflet, the man in the pub
  whose certain knowledge reveals universal
  characteristics of his subject the Oriental,
  those blacks, the pakis

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Orientalism

• There has never been a single idea of the
  Orient in the West, such a construction would
  reduce the West to a single monolithic mode of
  thinking in the way that Orientalist theory
  claims is true of the East.
• Hence Said differs from those who study the
  history of ideas his approach is
  anthropological in that Said takes all texts to
  be worldly and circumstantial (Said, 1978,
  p.23), all ideas as material products of their
  political and cultural climates.
• His work represents a sustained critique of power
  relations between West and East, the USA and the
  Muslim countries, Israel and Palestine, and the
  racialising and racist consequences of these
  relations from the eighteenth century right up to
  the present day.

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Orientalism

• Can one divide human reality, as indeed human
  reality seems to be genuinely divided, into
  clearly different races, and survive the
  consequences humanely? By surviving the
  consequences humanely, I mean to ask whether
  there is any way of avoiding the hostility
  expressed by the division, say, of men into us
  (Westerners) and they (Orientals). For such
  divisions are generalities whose use historically
  and actually has been to press the importance of
  the distinction between some men and some other
  men, usually towards not especially admirable
  ends Orientalism as a form of thought for
  dealing with the foreign has typically shown the
  altogether regrettable tendency of any knowledge
  based on such hard-and-fast distinctions as
  East and West to channel thought into a West
  or an East compartment. (Said, 1978, p.45)

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Orientalism

• Orientalism
• transfixes the being, the object of study,
  within its inalienable and non-evolutive
  specificity, instead of defining it as all other
  beings, states, nations, peoples, and cultures
  as a product, a result of the vection of forces
  operating in the field of historical evolution.
  Thus one ends with a typology based on a real
  specificity, but detached from history, and
  consequently conceived as being intangible,
  essential which makes of the studied object
  another being with regard to whom the studying
  subject is transcendent we will have a homo
  Sinicus, a homo Arabicus (and why not a homo
  Ægypticus, etc.), a homo Africanus, the man
  the normal man, it is understood being the
  European man of the historical period, that is,
  since Greek antiquity. (Abdel-Malek, in Said,
  1978, p.97).

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Bibliography

• Said, E. (1978) Orientalism, London Routledge
  Kegan Paul
• Said, E. (2003a) Dreams and delusions, Al-Ahram
  Weekly, 562, http//weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/652/o
  p1.htm, accessed 10/07/06
• Said, E. (2003b) Imperial Perspectives,
  Al-Ahram Weekly, 648, http//weekly.ahram.org.eg/2
  003/648/op2.htm, accessed 10/07/06
• Said, E. (2003c) Preface (2003) in Said, E.,
  Orientalism, London Penguin Books
• Said, E. (2005) Dignity and Solidarity in Said,
  E. From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map Essays,
  New York Vintage