Said, Orientalism: Orientalism Now

I haven't completely finished the reading as of yet, but I wanted to get out some of my initial reactions to the reading and trying as much as possible to offer concrete connections and examples within the three works that we are working off: MC, Pterodactyl and The Shadow Lines.

By lifting up quotes from Said, and offering comments I hope to effectively approach this large section of text. This will allow me to get a more specific points Said makes as opposed to speaking in generalities.

Said begins by recounting what he has already accomplished and set out: that Orientalism (O) is a system of truths that operate in multiple realms: politics, culture, religion and so on. Certainly, and this was a point that I tried to raise last meeting, was that although all societies and individuals tend to operate within a schema of generalities, and labels, what seems to be important are the power systems that give base to O. The basic fact that there is domination within the system of O from the Western to the East, suggests the political creditability of O.

The Orient that appears in Orientalism, then, is a system of representations frame by a whole set of forces that brought the orient into Western learning, Western consciousness, and later, Western empire. If this definition of O seems more political than not, that is simply because I think O was itself a product of certain political forces and activities.

What seems important to note within the passage above is the fact that O is overtly political. I understand this to mean in connection to power systems and hegemony certainly. Further, I do not think that Said upholds O as a system that was created and is static and has been altered into something new something different. In fact, Said, addresses this later:

"Thus O is not only a positive doctrine about the Orient that exists at any one time in the Wester; it is also an influential academic tradition (When one refers to an academic specialist who is called and Orientalist), as well as an area of concern defined by travelers, commercial enterprises, governments military expeditions, readers of novel and accounts of exotic adventure, natural historians and pilgrims to whom the Orient is a specfic kind of knowlege about specific places, people, and civilizations."

Here, it seems that O is understood again to be a way of looking at the world and acting, something that is informative of both how an individual conceives of other as well as herself.

O is informative of how an individual conceives of herself and others: specifically of how the West understood the East. This is not a relationship that operates through equalities, but rather one that exists and uses (in) absences and presences:

"I mean to say that in discussion of the Orient, the Orient is all absence, whereas one feels the Orientaist and what he says as presence; yet we must not forget that the Orientalist's presence is enabled by the Orient's effective absence.

Said raises an interesting point that becomes important in postcolonial studies: the role of voice within a colonial state. This is noted well within Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak" as well as Hutcheon's "Decentering the excentric." For Spivak, O may stand as the basis through which those power systems that establish the hierarchical relationships. Further, for Hutcheon, PM stands as a inherently political was of thinking and looking at the world. O. then stands as a as the ideology (for certainly, O. influences Westerners consciousnesses unconsciously) that PM strives to deconstruct and problematize.

Said spends time looking through historical account of the Orient, and analyzes the power systems that upheld them: It was shown that O. serves to inform the colonial state just as much as the colonized. This sort of binary, operating through unified, monolithic identities, breaks down when nation states are given histories that do not coincide with those notions but rather serve to emphasize a milieu that is not single but rather varied; not monolithic but rather influenced and informed from multiple sources. This can be seen in Pterodactyl: in this case O may be seen as permeating even the nationalist self identifications. Here, a history, an identity, a geography and even a way of life (conception of the world, evidenced through an ethos) can be heavily influenced by determining and authoritative and thus oppressive understandings. In Pterodactyl, the events described are problematic and controversial explicitly because a community's way of life, self-determined identity and so on conflict with a nationalist governments understanding of their social role. The famine is a drought, the pterodactyl doesn't exist, and individual's are not dying due to lack of governmental support, but rather natural, undetermined causes. This is explicitly political. This is explicitly informed through notions of how persons are conceived, in contrast to others, and finally how they are to act.


Hopefully, I'll have further, more concrete thoughts as I think over this later tonight.