Representations

[bibliogramma]

Orientalism, Edward Said

I have, at long last, read this classic work that is considered to be one of the foundations of post-colonial studies. As I understand it, Said's underlying premise - one that is now very much a part of post-colonial criticism and political activism - is that the colonial and imperial cultures of Europe (and North America), by the very fact of their colonial and imperial position, create images of colonised nations and peoples that are not congruent with how these colonised people and nations perceive themselves, or with the realities of life and culture in these nations and among these peoples. Nonetheless, colonial powers, even after they lose direct control of colonised people, continue to impose these images from a position of assumed superiority, and this colours all discourse in colonial and former colonial powers about the colonised nations and peoples. The representation of a colonial nation in literature, art, and other cultural artefacts, becomes the nation itself, in Western eyes, and all discourse - including consideration of current economic and political policy - occurs within the framework imposed by the representation.

Said applies this premise to an examination of Orientalism - at the time of his writing (in 1978) the term used to describe the academic field of study devoted to the literature, history and culture of countries of "The Orient" - with particular focus on how Orientalists represented in their work the cultures of the Middle East.

It is a fascinating jounrney through the processes by which first, all Islamic, Arab and Middle-Eastern cultures are elided into one, and that one is represented as both oppositional and inferior to Western cultures in very specific ways.

What is particularly important about Said's argument is that he directly connects cultural representations with political ideology and goals:

Too often literature and culture are presumed to be politically, even historically, innocent; it has regularly semed otherwise to me, and certainly my study of Orientalism has convinced me... that society and literary culture can only be understood and studies together. (p. 27)

My whole point about this system is not that it is a misrepresentation of some Oriental essence — in which I do not for a moment believe — but that it operates as representations usually do, for a purpose, according to a tendency, in a specific historical, intellectual, and even economic setting. In other words, representations have purposes, they are effective much of the time, they accomplish one or many tasks. (p. 273)

While I had gleaned many of the principles of Said's arguemnts from later discourses in both post-colonial literary criticism and political theory, it was well worth it to go back to the beginning and look at the evidence, so to speak.