How does Said define Orientalism in his introduction (1978)?

How does Said define Orientalism in his introduction (1978)?

…Orientalism, a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on
the Orient’s special place in European Western experience. The Orient is
not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe’s 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. In addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West)
as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. Yet none of this is
merely imaginative. The Orient is an integral part of European material
civilization and culture. Orientalism expresses and represents that part
culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting
institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, and even colonial
bureaucracies and colonial styles. (Said 1-2)

…my real argument is that Orientalism is—and does not simply represent
—a considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, and as
such has less to do with the Orient than it does with “our” world. (12)

Discourse in the work of Foucault
describes ways of constituting knowledge
and the power relations between forms of
knowledge and social practices. It is
more than just ways of thinking and
producing meaning, but also how certain
forms of thinking and meaning come to
have authority and power.

“I am supposing that in every society the
production of discourse is at once
controlled, selected, organised and
redistributed according to a certain
number of procedures, whose role
is to avert its powers and its dangers, to
cope with chance events, to evade its
ponderous, awesome materiality.”
(Foucault, “The Discourse on Language”)

Philosopher and historian Michel Foucault
(1926-1984)

Marxist political philosopher Gramsci divides society into two parts:
Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) •  civil society: “voluntary (or at least rational

and noncoercive) affiliations like schools,
families, and unions”
•  political society: “state institutions (the army,
the police, the central bureaucracy) whose
role in the polity is direct domination”

“Culture, of course, is to be found operating in
civil society, where the influence of ideas, of
institutions, and of other persons works not
through domination but by what Gramsci calls
consent. In any society not totalitarian, then,
certain cultural forms predominate over others;
the form of this cultural leadership is what
Gramsci has identified as hegemony, an
indispensible concept for understanding of
cultural life in the industrial West.” (Said 7)

Cultural hegemony describes how the ruling
class controls and manipulates cultural
institutions (religion, art, popular culture) so as
to maintain political power.

Three interdependent meanings of Orientalism:

1.  academic study and institutions: “Anyone who teaches, writes about, or
researches the Orient—and this applies whether the person is an
anthropologist, sociologist, historian, or philologist—either in its specific or
its general aspects, is an Orientalist, and what he or she does is
Orientalism” (2). [This is a dated designation, in part because of the
profound effect Said’s work had on the academy]

2.  general/imaginative meaning: “Orientalism is a style of thought based
upon an ontological [philosophy that deals with the nature of being] and
epistemological [theory of knowledge] distinction made between “the Orient”
and (most of the time) “the Occident.” (2)

3. historical/material meaning: Since the late 18th century,
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, Orientalism as a Western style for
dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” (3)

imaginative meaning: 19th century repertory of images and ideas about Oriental
despotism, splendor, and cruelty

Eugène Delacroix, Death of Sardanapalus (1827)

imaginative meaning: 19th century repertory of images and ideas Oriental
mysticism and traditions

Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Snake Charmer (1879)

imaginative meaning: 19th century repertory of images and ideas about Oriental
sensuality and feminine submission (concubines, harems, erotic dancers, etc.)

Jean Auguste Dominque Ingres, Grande Odalisque (1815)

Gustave Flaubert’s description of Kuchuk Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Almeh (With
Hanem, an Egyptian dancer with whom Pipe) (1873)
he had a brief affair in 1850:

When she bends, her flesh ripples into
bronze ridges. Her eyes are dark and
enormous. Her eyebrows black, her
nostrils open and wide; heavy shoulders,
full, apple-shaped breasts. (…) Her black
hair, wavy, unruly, pulled straight back on
each side from a center parting beginning
at the forehead; small braids joined
together at the nape of her neck. She has
one upper incisor, right, which is
beginning to go bad […] She squeezes
her bare breasts together with her jacket.
She rises first on one foot, then on the
other — marvelous movement: when one
foot is on the ground, the other moves up
and across in front of the shinbone — the
whole thing with a light bound. (Flaubert
in Egypt 114-5)

Flaubert’s description of his sexual Gustave Moreau, The Apparition
encounter with Hanem in a private letter: (1874-6)

As for Kuchuk Hanem, ah! Set your mind at
rest, and at the same time correct your ideas
about the Orient. You may be sure that she
felt nothing at all: emotionally, I guarantee;
and even physically, I strongly suspect. She
found us very good cawadjas (seigneurs),
because we left a goodly number of piastres
behind, that’s all. (…) The oriental woman is
no more than a machine: she makes no
distinction between one man and another.
Smoking, going to the baths, painting her
eyelids and drinking coffee—such is the
circle of occupations within which her
existence is confined. As for physical
pleasure, it must be very slight, since the
famous button, the seat thereof, is sliced off
at an early age. What makes this woman, in
a sense, so poetic, is that she relapses into
the state of nature. (Letters 181)

To be made Oriental

The Orient was Orientalized not only because it was discovered to be
“Oriental” in all those ways considered commonplace by an average
nineteenth-century European, but also because it could be—that is,
submitted to being—made Oriental. There is very little consent to be
found, for example, in the fact that Flaubert’s encounter with an
Egyptian courtesan produced a widely influential model of the Oriental
woman; she never spoke of herself, she never represented her
emotions, presence, or history. He spoke for and represented her. He
was foreign, comparatively wealthy, male, and these were historical
facts of domination that allowed him not only to possess Kuchuk Hanem
physically but to speak for her and tell his readers in what way she was
“typically Oriental.” (Said 5-6)

How does this collective imagination of Eastern exoticism animate
contemporary popular culture?

One aspect of the electronic, postmodern world is that there has been a
reinforcement of the stereotypes by which the Orient is viewed.
Television, the films, and all the media’s resources have forced
information into more and more standardized molds. So far as the Orient
is concerned, standardization and cultural stereotyping have intensified
the hold of the nineteenth-century academic and imaginative
demonology of the “mysterious Orient.” (26)

Walt Disney Features, Aladdin (1992)

WED Enterprises/Walt Disney Imagineering, It’s a Small World (1966)

Coldplay featuring Beyoncé, music video for “Hymn for the Weekend” (2016)

Three qualifications about history, knowledge, and power

•  “We must take seriously Vico’s great observation that men make their own
history, that what they can know is what they have made, and extend it to
geography: as both geographical and cultural entities—to say nothing of
historical entities—such locals, regions, geographical sectors as “Orient” and
“Occident” are man-made. […] it would be wrong to conclude that the Orient
was essentially an idea, or a creation with no corresponding reality. […] There
were—and are—cultures and nations whose location is in the East, and their
lives, histories, and customs have a brute reality obviously greater than
anything that could be said about them in the West.” (5)

•  “Ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be understood or studies
without their force, or more precisely their configurations of power, also being
studied. […] The relationship between the Occident and the Orient is a
relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex
hegemony…” (5)

•  “One ought never to assume that the structure of Orientalism is nothing more
than a structure of lies or of myths which, were the truth about them to be told,
would simply blow away. […] 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.” (6)

Moralistic power: “Us” versus “them”

Orientalism is never far from…a collective notion identifying “us”
Europeans as against all of “those” non-Europeans, and indeed it can be
argued that the major component in European culture is precisely what
made that culture hegemonic both in and outside Europe: the idea of
European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-
European peoples and cultures. There is in addition the hegemony of
European ideas about the Orient, themselves reiterating European
superiority over Oriental backwardness, usually overriding the possibility
that a more independent, or more skeptical, thinking might have had
different views on the matter. In a quite constant way, Orientalism depends
for its strategy this flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner
in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever
losing him the relative upper hand. (7)

[Orientalism] is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various
kinds of power, …[including] power moral (as with ideas about what “we”
do and what “they” cannot do or understand as “we” do). (12)

How Orientalism relates to Prof. Lazo’s reading of the war on terror

•  Said in 1993 on the rhetorical application of Orientalism to the war on terror:

“Islam’s role in hijackings and terrorism, descriptions of the way in
which overtly Muslim countries like Iran threaten ‘us’ and our way of
life, and speculations about the latest conspiracy to blow up buildings,
sabotage commercial airliners, and poison water supplies seem to
play increasingly on Western consciousness.”

•  Lazo’s emphasis on the rhetorical aspects of the war on terror:

•  Construction of the idea of a terrorist based on a set of popular
connotations (anti-American, anti-democratic, evil, access to dangerous
weapons, isolates action from other acts of violence, etc.)

•  “Clash of the civilization” based on binaries between the East and West,
Christianity and Islam, “us” vs. “them”

•  Explication of the language of “shadowy terrorist networks,” supposition
and hypothetical scenarios in President G.W. Bush’s State of the Union
speech of 2003

Edward Said, “Islam and the West are inadequate banners” (The Guardian,
September 16, 2001)

“This is a war against terrorism, everyone says, but where, on what fronts, for what
concrete ends? No answers are provided, except the vague suggestion that the
Middle East and Islam are what “we” are up against, and that terrorism must be
destroyed. What is most depressing, however, is how little time is spent trying to
understand America's role in the world, and its direct involvement in the complex
reality beyond the two coasts that have for so long kept the rest of the world
extremely distant and virtually out of the average American's mind. You'd think that
'America' was a sleeping giant rather than a superpower almost constantly at war,
or in some sort of conflict, all over the Islamic domains. Osama bin Laden's name
and face have become so numbingly familiar to Americans as in effect to obliterate
any history he and his shadowy followers might have had before they became
stock symbols of everything loathsome and hateful to the collective imagination.”

“Besides, much as it has been quarrelled over by Muslims, there isn't a single
Islam: there are Islams, just as there are Americas. This diversity is true of all
traditions, religions or nations even though some of their adherents have futiley
tried to draw boundaries around themselves and pin their creeds down neatly. Yet
history is far more complex and contradictory than to be represented by
demagogues who are much less representative than either their followers or
opponents claim.”

Think about how much binary between us versus them is used in the contemporary
political landscape (across the political spectrum):

Reading Waiting for the Barbarians Thematically and Formally

•  Novel as a genre: fictitious prose narrative of book length, typically representing
character and action with some degree of realism (OED)

•  Prof. Lazo asked questions both about the themes of the novel:
•  Blindness: How does the tension of seeing/not seeing and the inability to see
emerge at various points in the novel?
•  Cleanliness: How does the magistrate’s obsession with physical cleanliness
speak to his desire to keep his own conscience clean?
•  Empire: How does this narrative thematize the operations of empire across
time and space? Is this imperial Rome, colonial America, or apartheid-era
South Africa? Or is this an allegory for multiple empires?
•  Civilization vs. barbarism: How are barbarians described? Who is on the
inside and who is on the outside of “civilization”?

•  As well as questions about the formal strategies of the novel:
•  What is the role of the narrator? How does he describe himself at various
points in the book, that is, how is he characterized?
•  How does Coetzee handle the characterization of other figures in the novel?
•  How does Coetzee build the setting of the novel?
•  What is the effect of omission and limited description on the narrative?

Narrative Voice in Waiting for the Barbarians

•  Does the narrator speak in the first, second, or third person, or are there
shifts in point of view?

•  Is the story narrated in the past or present tense? Does the verb tense
affect your reading of it in any way?

•  Does the narrator use a distinctive vocabulary, style, and tone, or is the
language more standard and neutral?

•  Are there shifts in vernacular or style? Is the narrator identified as a
character, and if so, how much does he or she participate in the action?

•  Does the narrator ever address the reader directly or explicitly state
opinions or values?

•  Is the narrator omniscient to all characters’ thoughts, or is the narrative
perspective limited?

•  Does the narrative voice or focus shift during the story remain
consistent?

•  Do the narrator, the characters, and the reader all perceive matters in
the same way, or are there differences in levels of understanding?

•  How are events sequenced?
•  Are there any unusual formal devices at work in the narrative strategy?

Narrative Strategies in Waiting for the Barbarians

For example, think about the parenthetical asides to the reader:

He tells me about the last great drive he rode in, when thousands of
deer, pigs, bears were slain, so many that a mountain of carcasses
had to be left to rot (“Which was a pity”). (1)

(At a certain point I begin to plead my own cause.) (5)

He hears me out, even (I have the feeling) leads me on a little. (11)

(On the other hand, who am I to assert my distance from him? I drink
with him, I eat with him, I show him the sights, I afford him every
assistance as his letter of commission requests, and more. The
Empire does not require that its servants love each other, merely that
they perform their duty.) (6)

(Or is it only in the provinces that headsmen and torturers are still
thought of as unclean?) Looing at him I wonder how he felt the very
first time; did he, invited as an apprentice to twist the pincers or turn
the screw or whatever it is they do, shudder even a little to know that
at the instant he was trespassing into the forbidden? (12)

How to prepare for the midterm?

•  Make sure that you have carefully read all of the texts in the class to
date this quarter (including all of the shorter texts from the HCC Guide
and Reader with special emphasis on Douglass and Coetzee).

•  Carefully review your lecture notes and Prof. Fahs and Lazo’s
Powerpoints. Think about key concepts, their own theses/interpretive
claims about the material, and important images.

•  Carefully review your notes from section, especially the “key concepts”
that we have discussed.

•  Review your answers to the study questions for Weeks 1 & 2,
Dershowitz/Scarry, Edward Said, Elaine Scarry, and J.M. Coetzee.
While they won’t be in that exact form on the midterm, those are
certainly “fair game” subjects for short-answer questions (and they will
help you review the material for your essay question as well).