Said's Orientalism

Provider: Amy Yeh/葉心怡
(October 31, 2000)

Thesis: Said's Orientalism decodes the power relationship between the Occident and the Orient to analyze how the West manipulates knowledge of and for the Orient, and to elaborate how the East is influenced and existed in knowledge.

I.The History of Orientalism

A. 18^th-19^th: an Oriental Renaissance

B. 19^th-20^th: "With such experiences as Napoleon's the Orient as a body of knowledge in the West was modernized,"which means that Orientalism becomes and academic branch (Rivkin 882).*Imperialism

C. "Orientalism imposed limits upon thought about the Orient" (Rivkin 882).

II. The definition of the Orient and Orientalism

A. The definition of the Orient

1. The Orient is "the other" for the West, which means the existence of the Orient is to be the "contrasting image, idea, personality, experience" (Introduction 2) for the West.

2. The Orient is not alienated: "The Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture" (Introduction 2). *economic structure and culture expansion

B.The definition of Orientalism

1. "Orientalsim is an academic one, and indeed the label still serves in a number of academic institutions"  (Introduction 2).

2. "Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between 'the Orient' and 'the Occident' (Introduction 2).

3. "Orientalism is a Western style for dominating, reconstructing and having authority over the Orient" (Introduction 3).

4. Depicting Foucault's theory of "discourse": "Orientalism as a discourse" (Introduction 3), which means that European culture employs the "systematic discipline" to "manage and even produce" (Introduction 3) Orientalism.

III.Orientalism is man-made and constructed by the West

A."...the Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the west" (Introduction 5).

B. The Orient is created and "Orientalized."

C."The relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony..." (Introduction 5).

l Gramsci's notion of hegemony: it is hegemony of imperial power so that Orientalism is a system of knowledge.

l The Orient is the representation of Western hegemony

D. Orientalism is not myth: "Orientalism is more particularly valuable as a sign of European-Atlantic power over the orient than it is as a discourse about the Orient" (Introduction 6).

IV. Said's three perspectives in researching Orientalism

A.The distinction between pure and political knowledge

1. "Orientalism is rather a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts..." (Introduction 12) (Rivkin 873).

2.Orientalism is "a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different"  (Introduction 12) (Rivkin 874).

3. The Orient is not only a cultural and political representation but a "considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, and as such has less to do with the Orient than it does "our world" (Introduction 12) (Rivkin 874).

B.The methodological question

1. The experience of the Orient in British, French, and American is as an unit.

2. Methodology for authority study

Works Cited

Said, Edward W. "Orientalism." Literary Theory: An Anthology. Eds.Julie Rivkin and 

Michael Ryan.Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1998.873-885.

Said, Edward W. "Introduction." Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.1-28.

--- "Knowing the Oriental." Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.31-49.

(external) Literary Criticism Databank: Postcolonialism