What I'm Reading: Edward Said, "Orientalism"

It’s amazing how thorough Said is. He seems to have read just about everybody, which has its positives and negatives for readers of this classic survey of Western attitudes towards the East. He goes back centuries, examining not just political speeches and literature about “the Orient” but academic works too; he doesn’t just discuss the gung-ho speeches of Lord Cromer and Arthur Balfour or the sweetly racist poetry of Kipling, but scholarly works too - translations, ethnographies, dictionaries, and surveys. He demonstrates that although Western writers might have thought they were observing the rest of the world objectively, in fact they were changing what they were observing by observing it from a position of power. A position of power steeped in a history of colonialist invasion and exploitation. Not only is orientalist work characterised by -

“deploying large generalisations by which reality is divided into various collectives: languages, races, types, colours, mentalities, each category being not so much a neutral designation as an evaluative interpretation”

- but also by power relations making that work a decidedly one-way street: 

“Behind each statement there resonated the tradition of experience, learning, and education that kept the Oriental-coloured to his position of object studied by the Occiental-white, instead of vice-versa.” [Emphasis his]

Like I said, the fact that Said has seemingly read everybody has its pros and cons. The upside is that he makes a damn strong argument: he has centuries of evidence to back him up. The downside is that in places he seems to assume that you’ve read all those sources too: the book could really have used a few more lead-ins, like, “Mr. X was a 19th Century whatever, who wrote Mr. X’s Fantastically Racist Voyages in The Orient, which was an influential work because of whatever, and here’s what he had to say...” rather than just diving in. I found myself comparing this book to his later work Culture & Imperialism and preferring that one just because I feel like he realised it would reach a wider audience after the explosive success of Orientalism and endeavoured to make it a bit clearer.

Alarmingly, although this book was written in the 70s it’s remarkably relevant and even prescient: some of the orientalist patterns Said describes I still see woven into works today, especially the mistaken and oft-repeated reduction of Eastern religions and cultures to static, unchanging monoliths. Here he is criticising the laziness of 19th Century scholar William Robertson Smith - 

“The Arabian desert is thus considered to be a locale about which one can make statements regarding the past in exactly the same form (and with the same content) that one makes them regarding the present. In the Hejaz you can speak about Muslims, modern Islam, and primitive Islam without bothering to make distinctions.” 

- but this could just as easily be a criticism of any number of 21st Century authors, pundits, and politicians. I also especially enjoyed his criticisms of Marx’s own orientalism, just because that’s a side of Ol’ Karl I hadn’t seen before.

Although it’s a tough read, this is a classic for a reason and it still holds up. Thank you to Vespere Sebastien Oaks, who got it for me from my Amazon wishlist. If you’d like to read it, you can get it here.