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Dec. 10th, 2009 01:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsPossibly I should have read Orientalism a year or two ago when I was still in school . . . but better late than never!
Um, so this is a pretty foundational text for studies of the way apparently academic enterprises like historical, linguistic and literary studies are linked to colonial realities. Edward Said focuses pretty much entirely on relations between Europe/America and Islam, which is fair, since one book cannot do everything and that is his background - though I wish he would have left out the occasional sweeping generalization about relationships with other bits of the "Oriental" world, since he doesn't have time or inclination to do them justice. The book is mostly spent building up his case that one overwhelming view of the Islamic world as unchanging, anti-modernist, and generally inferior and in need of European mediation and guidance has completely dominated studies of that region, and is pretty much inextricable from colonialist foreign policy from the nineteenth century on.
Honestly, though, I have to say - from the enormous reaction that there has been to Orientalism since it was published, I was kind of expecting (and would not have blamed Said for) an angrier, more polemical book, but in fact on the whole he is really careful to avoid that. Even in introducing his subject, he points out that of course most cultures build up stereotyped visions of The Other in their heads; the specific issue with Orientalism is how the power dynamic between Europe and the Islamic world in the last two centuries has cemented the Oriental stereotype into place, without allowing for any change. Every so often he allows himself to be really sarcastic, which - okay, I have to admit, it's always fun to read academic sniping ("Lewis' verbosity scarcely conceals both the ideological underpinnings of his position and his extraordinary capacity for getting nearly everything wrong") but just as often he will make a remark praising what someone has done and then quickly qualify that he is not being sarcastic, and that even in the problematic context he really does find qualities to admire!
Probably the most interesting part overall was the afterward, written about a decade after the original book was published, in which he emphasizes yet again that his goal is not to attack the West, but in fact to break down the whole idea that you can summarily categorize massive groups of people as "East" and "West", class all of these millions of people under the umbrella of certain specific and unchanging characteristics, and work off the premise of an enormous insurmountable divide between them. This idea may seem pretty obvious . . . but unfortunately a lot of what is written shows all too clearly that it is not.
Um, so this is a pretty foundational text for studies of the way apparently academic enterprises like historical, linguistic and literary studies are linked to colonial realities. Edward Said focuses pretty much entirely on relations between Europe/America and Islam, which is fair, since one book cannot do everything and that is his background - though I wish he would have left out the occasional sweeping generalization about relationships with other bits of the "Oriental" world, since he doesn't have time or inclination to do them justice. The book is mostly spent building up his case that one overwhelming view of the Islamic world as unchanging, anti-modernist, and generally inferior and in need of European mediation and guidance has completely dominated studies of that region, and is pretty much inextricable from colonialist foreign policy from the nineteenth century on.
Honestly, though, I have to say - from the enormous reaction that there has been to Orientalism since it was published, I was kind of expecting (and would not have blamed Said for) an angrier, more polemical book, but in fact on the whole he is really careful to avoid that. Even in introducing his subject, he points out that of course most cultures build up stereotyped visions of The Other in their heads; the specific issue with Orientalism is how the power dynamic between Europe and the Islamic world in the last two centuries has cemented the Oriental stereotype into place, without allowing for any change. Every so often he allows himself to be really sarcastic, which - okay, I have to admit, it's always fun to read academic sniping ("Lewis' verbosity scarcely conceals both the ideological underpinnings of his position and his extraordinary capacity for getting nearly everything wrong") but just as often he will make a remark praising what someone has done and then quickly qualify that he is not being sarcastic, and that even in the problematic context he really does find qualities to admire!
Probably the most interesting part overall was the afterward, written about a decade after the original book was published, in which he emphasizes yet again that his goal is not to attack the West, but in fact to break down the whole idea that you can summarily categorize massive groups of people as "East" and "West", class all of these millions of people under the umbrella of certain specific and unchanging characteristics, and work off the premise of an enormous insurmountable divide between them. This idea may seem pretty obvious . . . but unfortunately a lot of what is written shows all too clearly that it is not.
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Date: 2009-12-10 07:01 pm (UTC)This idea may seem pretty obvious . . . but unfortunately a lot of what is written shows all too clearly that it is not.
Pretty much.
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Date: 2009-12-10 07:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-10 07:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-10 08:03 pm (UTC)Is it sad to say that it was actually a little better than I was expecting as re: women . . .? Like, at least he acknowledges that they exist! And some of the intersectionality between Orientalism and sexism!
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Date: 2009-12-10 08:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-10 08:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-10 08:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-10 08:32 pm (UTC)I have been going down your list in order! . . . in the way where I have not actually read any of them yet, but I have Half of a Yellow Sun and The Toughest Indian in the World out of the library and in the reading rotation right now. But I may shift Power, Politics and Culture up the list.
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Date: 2009-12-11 02:05 am (UTC)I'd read Culture and Imperialism for a class called The World and the West, taught by a prof from Kenya, IIRC, and we also read Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, because our prof was a clever duck that way, letting us read both at the same time. By the end of that class, I was a lifelong fan of Said, who is a brilliant writer and academic and who changed the way I think, and still go into a frothing rage at hearing the name of that goddamn racist shitheel Huntington.
Ahhh, memory lane.
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Date: 2009-12-11 04:48 am (UTC)Culture and Imperialism is also on my list (
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Date: 2009-12-11 04:34 am (UTC)Sounds like I probably should read the whole book, though.
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Date: 2009-12-11 04:50 am (UTC)The whole book is definitely worth reading, I think - and a good starting point for a lot of contemporary theory.