Orientalism

Orientalism refers to Western images, conceptions and valuations of Asia.

Edward Said and Orientalism

The American-Palestinian scholar Edward Said argued in his highly influential book Orientalism (1979) that western scholars were so contaminiated by their European ideas and preconcepions that they could not deal honestly and fairly with Asian topics. In particular he focused on how western scholars treated the Middle East, his own native region where he was a major political activist. Said concluded that they looked down upon their subjects as inferior to Westerners, and in general backward and in need of European authority and guidance. Said focused on the discipline of Oriental Studies in Europe, including philology, linguistics, ethnography, and the interpretation of culture through the discovery and translation of Oriental texts.

Said did not comment on whether anyone could deal honestly and fairly with Asia, for he was taking a general postmodern view that complete analysis is never possible. His argument, however, was taken as an attack on western specialists who in turn tried to pick apart his examples, and challenged his basic postmodern epistemology. Said was not an expert on any aspect of Asian history of culture (he was a specialist in English literature from Britain and America), which weakened his arguments with specialists.

Said's critique of Orientalisms provoked a comprehensive review by postcolonial theorists of the bulk of Western knowledge regarding non-Western countries; this time the analysis was done by experts who did know Asian culture. The postcolonialists argued that Orientalist literature buttressed the colonial notion of a civilizing mission. Gender studies plays a major role, as postcolonial feminists such as Gayatri Spivak, Chandra Mohanty, and Rajeswari Rajan analyze and condemn Western feminism's ideological complicity with Orientalist and imperialist ventures.

Early modern Europe

The concept of Oriental despotism allowed early modern Europeans to distinguish themselves from the most powerful and impressive non-European civilizations of the Ottoman Middle East, Persia, India, and China on grounds that were neither fundamentally religious nor linked to sheer scientific and technological progress but were rather political and moral. The French Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire (1694-1778) situated India within a global context of history and cultural exchange. He helped create a recognizable entity, "India," in the Western imagination by studying selected texts and focusing on a romanticized ideal of India as an Oriental paradise. Voltaire's motivation was primarily the Enlightenment attack on the Catholic Church and more specifically Voltaire's claim that many of the most important Christian rituals had their origin in Hindu rituals.

German scholars

In 1808, Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829) published his Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (1808). This work distilled his long study of Sanskrit and Indian literature and introduced evidence and hypotheses regarding the affinities between Sanskrit and the languages of Europe, especially Greek, Latin, and German. This kinship had earlier been suggested in the writings of Brisih Sanscrit expert Sir William Jones. Schlegel's work also explored Indian and Oriental philosophies and suggested that these, like the language, had been transmitted to Europe in the remote past. In fact, there was a growing interest in Indian civilization, symbolism, and religion in the Romantic era, and interest also visible in the ideas - often derived from etymological research - of Franz Bopp, Joseph Görres, and Friedrich Creuzer. These writers probed the area of comparative mythology with particular eagerness. Accurate or not in its speculations, German Orientalism was significant in part because it contributed to the ideological formation of a German identity in the l9th century, and not just where the emergence of the anti-Semitic notion of an "Aryan Race" is concerned. In this, the Germans' imaginative explorations were rather distinct from those of the British scholars whose views of India were often gained and conditioned by the colonizing experience. Schlegel modeled his studies on the humanistic project of the Renaissance but predicated on the assumption that all European cultures were united around a Germanic core originally influenced by the Asian East.

British thought: Disraeli

Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881), a popular novelist and politician (later prime minister), was outspokenly philo-Semitic. He was a romantic who embraced his own Jewishness (although he had become a member of the Church of England as a young teenager) and in culture, habit, and political policy followed a pattern of Orientalist (spiritual, intuitive, and emotional rather than rational and practical) behavior. He clearly believed that Orientalism, rooted in Turkish and Semitic - both Arabian and Jewish - tradition, if supported and protected by the colonial powers, could offer much of value to the Christian West. Fueled by contemporary ethnology and race theories, Disraeli argued that Jews were a superior, "aristocratic" race destined to become the spiritual and intellectual guides for modern Europe. Enabling such claims was Disraeli's skillful manipulation of Orientalist discourse, whereby he routinely reversed its stereotypical privileging of West over East. Following the example of William Makepeace Thackeray's 1847 satiric response to Disraeli in the story "Codlingsby," however, Schweller (2006) argues that Disraeli's "strategy of reversals" ultimately failed because it did not adequately comprehend traditional Western associations and meanings of "aristocracy," a fundamental misunderstanding that, for Disraeli's political enemies and critics, exposed him yet again as a foreigner, an Oriental, and a Jew.

Proudman (2005) presents a detailed critique of Said's representation of Disraeli as the archetypal Orientalist. Far from functioning as a producer of knowledge about the East that undergirded imperialism, Disraeli remained consistently sympathetic to Islam, both in his 1847 novel Tancred and in his political involvement with the Balkan crises of the 1870s. The novel, published one year after the division of the Tory party, was primarily a critique of British liberalism, in which Disraeli used a romanticized vision of the Orient to attack the values of post-Enlightenment Europe. Said, in failing to take into account Disraeli's political environment, committed factual errors that included erroneously holding him responsible for the occupation of Egypt in 1882.

Bibliography

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• Klein, Christina. Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (2003), re American perceptions online edition
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• Kuklick, Bruce. Puritans in Babylon: The ancient Near East and American intellectual life, 1880-1930, (1996) stresses American interest in India and Biblical lands online at ACLS e-books
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