Orientalism

Assignment Paper E-C-305

Topic- Orientalism

Rajyaguru Mansi D

M.A. Part – 1

SEM- I

Roll No -12

Year – 2010-11

Department of English

Orientalism :

On a visit to Beirut during the terrible civil was of 1975-1976 a french Journal wrote regretfully  of the gutted downtown area that “ It had once semd to belong to – the orient of chateabriand  and  nerual” He was  right about the place, of course especially so far as a european was concerned the orient was almost a european invention and had beewn since  antiquity a  place of remance exotic beings  haunting memories and landscapes remarkable experience now it was dispperingin a sense it had happened its time was over perhaps it seemmed irrelevant that orientals them selves had something at stake in the process that  even in the time of   chataubriand and nerval orientals had lived  there  and that now it was they who were suffering the main thing for the Eudopean visitor was a european  representation ofthe orient and its contemporary fate both of which had a privileged communal significance for the jorunalistand his french readers  americans will not feel quite the same about the orient. Whichj for them is much more likelt to be associated very differently with the far east (China and japan, mainly) unlike the americans, the french and the Birtish  less so the germans, russians spanish, portuguese, italians and swiss have had a long tradition of what i related to this academic tradition.

World was II the involvement of every other European and Atlantic power. To speak if orientalism therefore is to speak mainly although not excusively, of a british and french cultural enterprise a project whose dimensions take in such disparate realms as the imagination itself, the whole of india and the Levant, the Biblical texts and Biblical lands the spice trade colomnical armies and a long tradition of colonial administrators a formidable scholarly corpus innumerable oriental  experts “ and “hands” an oriental professorate a compleex  array of “Orintal” ideas (oriantals despotism , orienral splendor cruetly senscuality )many eastern sects philosophies and wisdoms domesticated for local European use the listcan be sxtended more or less indefinitely. My point is that orientalism derives from a particular  closeness experienced between britain and France and the  orient , which until the early  nineteenth century had really meant only India and the bible lands from the beginning of the 19^th century until the end of world war II France and Britain dominated the orient and orientalism since world was II America has dominated the orient and approaches it as france and Britain once did out that closeness whose dynamic is enormously productive even it it always demonstrates the comparatively greater strength  of occident (British,French, orAmrican ) comes the large body of texts I call orientalist.

I mentioned there aspects ofmy contemporary reality i must explain and brietly discuss them now so that it can be seen how i as led to a particular course of research and writting  .

It is very easy to argue that knowledge about shakespeare of words worth is not political where as knowledge about contemporarly china ore the soviet union is my own formal and profgessional deisgnation is that of “ humanist” a title which indicated the humanities as my field and therefore the unlikely eventuality that there might be anything political about what i do in the field of course  all these lebels and terms are quite unnuanced as i use them here but the general truth of what i am pointing to is, I thing widely held onereason for saying that a humanist who srites about word worth or an editor whose speciality is keats, is not invbolved in anything political is that what he does seems to have no direct political effects upon reality in the everyday sense. A scholar whose fould is soviet economics works in a highly charged area where there is much government interest and what he might produce  in theway of stidies or proposals will  be taken  up by policy makers government  officials  institutional economists intelligence experts. The distinction between “ humannists” and person whose workd has policy implications or political significance can be broudened further by saying that the formers ideoligical color is matter of incidental importance to politics (although possibly of great moment to his colleagues in the field who may object to his colleagues in the field , who may objewct to his stalinism of fascism or too eary liberalism) whereas the ideology of the latter is woven directly into his material indeed economics, politics and sociology in the modern academy are idological science and therefore taken for granted as being “political”.

Whose goal is to reveal the dialectic between individual text or writer and the complex collective formation to which his work is a contribution.

Yet even though it includes an ample selection of writers this book is still far from a complete history or general account of oerintalism of this failing I am very conscious the fabric of as thick a discourse as orientalism has survived and functioned in western  society  because of its richness  “ all  I have done it to describe parts of that fabric at certain moments, merely to suggest the existence of a larger whole detailed interesting dotted with fascinating figures texts, and events, I have consoled myself with believing that this book is one installment of several and hope there are schgolars and critics who might want to write others. There is still a general essay to be written on inperialism and culture other studies  would go more deeply into the connection  between orientalism and pedagogy or into Italian ,Dutch Germany and Swiss orientalism or into the dynamic between scholarship and imaginative writing or into the relationship between adminstrative ideas and intellectual discipline perhaps the most important task of all would be to undertake studies in contemporary alternatives to orientalion  to ask how one can study other cultures and peoples from a liberatatrian or a nonrepressive and non manipulative , per –spective but then one would havbe to rethink the whole complex problem of knowledge and power these are all tasks left embarrassingly incomplate in this study the last perhaps self flattering observation on method that i want to make here is that i jave written this study with several audiences in mind,. For students of literatire and criticism. Orientalism offers a marvelosu instance of the interrelations between society hoshory and textuality moreover the cultiral role palyed by the orient in the west conncts  orientalism with ideology politics and the logic of power matters of relevance I think  to the literacy community for contemporary students of the dynamic between scholarship and imaginative writing or into the relationship between  administrative ideas and intellectual discipline perhaps the most important task of all would be to undertake studies in contemporary alternatives to orientalion to ask how one can study other cultures and peoples from a libertarian or a nonrecpessive and nonmanipulative per-seective But then one would  have to rethink the whole comlex problem of knowledge  and power these are all tacks left  embarrassingly incomplete in this  study . The last perhaps self –flattering observation on method that i want to make here is that i have written this study  with several audiences in mindfor students of  literature and criticism orientalism offers a marvelosu instance of the interrelarions between society history and tectuality moreover the cultural role played by the  orient in the west connects orientalism with ideology, politics and the logis of power, matters, of  relevance I think to the literacy  community for contemporary students of the orient , from university scholars  to policymakers i have written with two ends in mind : one to present their intellencual genealogis to them in a way that has not been done; two, to critize withy the hope of strring discussion the often unquestioned assumptions  on which their work for the most part depends for the general reader this study deals with mattes that  always complattention all of them connected not only with western conceptions and treatments of the other but also with the singularly important role played by western culture.

The nexus of knowledge  and power creating “ the orintal and in a sense oblitarating him as a human being is therefore not for me an exclusively academic matter. Yet it isan intellectial matter of some very obvious importance I have been able to put to use my humanistic and political concerns for the analysis and description of a very wordly matter the rise development  and conolidation of orientalism . Too often literature and eulture are presumed to be  politically even historically innocent it has regularly seemed  otherwise  to me, and certainlyt my study  of orientalism has convinced me (and I hope will convice literacy colleagues) that society and literary culture can only be understood and studied together, in addition and by an almost unsscapable logic i have found  my self writing the history of a strange  secret sharer of western anti-semitism that anti-semitism and as i have discussed  it in its islamic branch orientalism resembleeach other ery closely is a historical cultural and political truth that needs only to be mentioned to an arab polestinian for its irony to be perfectly understood but what i should like also to have contributed hare is a better understanding of the way clutoral domination has operated if this stimulates a new  kind of decalingwith the orient  indeed if it eliminates  the “orient” and “ occident” altogether then we shall habe advanced a litthe in the process of what Raymond Williams has calles the “ unlearing “ of “ the inherent dominative mode?”

Orientalism the durability and the strength I have been speaking about so far. Orientalism is never far from what denys Hay has called the idea of Europe a collective notion identifying “us”  Europeans as against all “ those non Europeans and indeed it can be argued that the major component in European culture is precisely what made that culture hegemonic both in and outside Europe the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the noneudopean peoples and cultures there is in addition the heghemonic of european ideas about the orient themselves reiterating european superiority over orintal backwardness usuallly  overriding the possibility that a more independent, or more skeptical, thinker might have had different views on the matter in a quite constant way orientalism depends for its strategy on this flexible positional superiority, which puts the westerner in a whole series of possible relationship with the orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand and why should it have been otherwise especially during the period of extraordinary .European assendancy from the late Renaissance to the present & the scientist  the scholar the missionary the traders or the soldier was in or thought about the orient because he could be there or could to think about it with very little resistance on the orients part under the general heading of knowledge of the orient and within the umbrella of western hegemony over the orient during the period  from the end of the 18^th century there emergeda complex orient suitable for study in the academy for display in the museum for reconstruction in the colonical office for theoretical illustration in anthropological biological linguistic racial and historical there about mankind and the inverse for instances of econimic and sociological theories of development , revolution cultural personality matioal or religious character additionally the imafinative examintation of things oriental was based more or less exclusively upon a sovereigin.

Western consciousness out of whose unchallenged centrality an oriental world emerged first according to general ideas about who or what was an oriental then according to a detailed logic governed not simply by empirical reality but by a battery of desires repressions, investments, and prosections, if we can point to great orientolist works of genuine scholarship like silvestre de sacy’s Chrestomathie arabe or Edward William Lane’s account of the manners and customs of the modern egyptians ,we need also to note that renan’s and gobinearies racial ideas come otu of the same umpules, and did a great many vectorian pronographic novels (see the analysis by Steven Marous of “ The Lustful Turk”)

Submitted to Dr Dilip Barad,

Department of English,

Bhavnagar University.