Orientalism (What is Orientalism?

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 2015-2016

Name: Baldaniya Vanita Velabhai

Semester: 3

Roll No: 29

Topic:  Orientalism

Edward Said (1977)

Work: Assignment

Paper: Course No: 11

The Postcolonial Literature.

Date: 19/10/2015

Submitted By: 

                       Smt. S.B.Gardi,

              Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

                                        Department of English.

         Orientalism

 What is Orientalism?

                        The term orient is derives from the Latin words 'Orients' meaning 'East'. The country of the cast specially East Asia. Study of orient means study of orients.

The Methodological problems?

                        (A) Historically and Materially

                        (B) Academic

                        (C) Imaginative Meaning

Different between orient and occident?

The relationship between orient and occident and is a relationship of power and domination.

Three contemporary aspect:

                   1) The distinction between pure and political

                   2) The Methodological question

                   3) The personal dimension

What do we means by "Orientalism".

                   -Arabic - Islamic world.

                   - Old civilization with and old knowledge system.

                   -Problem between white and Muslim people

                   -A story of middle East.

               Act of gazing and act of construction. East/ orient is orientalism. Orient is all about geography interesting play. Indian History  is rediscovered to Orientalism. The reader they by orientalism I means several things, all of them in my opinion, interdependent. The most reading accepted designation of orientalism is an academic one, and indeed the label still serves in a number of academic institutions.

                   Definition of Orientalism:

                                  ' Orientalism is  a style of thought based upon an

                                   ontological and epistemological distinction made

                                    between the "Orient" and the "Occident".'

                                My contention is that without examining orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage and even produce the orient politically sociologically, militarily , ideologically , scientifically and imaginatively during the past enlightenment period.

                                Human make History and humans make a agency removed supernatural power. Good and bad separate dominance lack of humanist create history, culture entities geography, orient is material idea, music supernatural, governess, imperial policy is very much materialistic orientalism is academic.

Main Themes:

Ø  Exotic East (east is east, west is west)

Ø  White man's burden

Ø  exotic east means to Maharaja's portrayals, that how they are portrayal in it there media also play  ideal role because how they are portraying.

Ø  Differentiation creates problems specially politically problems.

Ø  Hegemony

Michel Foucault gives  these idea:

                                A) Nation of Discourse

                                B) Idea of power

Ania Loomba's colonialism/post colonialism:

         She received B.A, M.A, M.Phill degree from the Delhi University.

        She researches and teachers early modern literature, histories of race and colonialism, post colonial studies, feminist theory and contemporary Indian literature and culture.  

Ania Loomba's view about colonialism and post colonialism:

                                Colonialism is the physical occupation of territory and post colonialism deals with the effects of colonialism on culture and society.

A) Imperialism

B) Neo Colonialism

C) colonial Literature

(A) Imperialism:

                                The oxford English Dictionary defines  ' imperial' as a 'pertaining to empire' and ' imperialism' as the rule of an emperor, specially when depolie and     arbitrary.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       This word is coined by British prime minister Benjamin.

.

(B) Neo-colonialism:

                                It is highest stage of colonialism. The main aim of it is that offer world war it maintain control of their formal colonies and economic arrangement.

(C) Colonial literature:

                                War creates the vast influence on the mind of the writers.

·         Aime cesaire's - " A Tempest"

·         Girish karnad's - " Hayavadana"

·         Gayatri spivak's - "Can the subaltern speak"

                On a visit to Beirut during the  terrible civil war of 1975-1976 a French journalist wrote regretfully of the gutted downtown area that..........

                                "It had once seemed to belong

                                to... the orient of chateaubriand

                                 and nerval"

                The orient was almost a European invention ,and had been since antiquity place of romance, exotic beings, humaniting memories and landscapes, remarkable experience.

Perhaps it seemed irrelevant that orientals themeselves had something at atake in the process, that even in the time of chateubriand and nerval orientals had lives there and that now it was they who were suffering, the main thing for the European visiter was a European representation of the orient and its contemporary fate, both of which had a privilege communal significance for the journalist and his French readers.

   The orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe's greatest and richest  and oldest colonies the source of its civilization and languages, its cultural contestant and one  of its deepest and most recurring images of the other.

  To speak of orientalism therefore is to speak mainly although not exclusively, 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 the biblical lands, the spice trade, colonial armies and a long tradition of colonial administrators, a formidable scholarly corpus, innumerable oriental "expert " and "hand" an oriental professorate a complex array of "oriental" ideas, many eastern sects, philosophies, and wisdoms domesticated for local European use the list can be extended more or less indefinitely.

 My point is that orientalism drives 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. I have begun with the assumption that the orient is not an inert fact of nature. 

  We must take seriously vico's great observation that men make their own history , that what they can know is what they have made, and extend it to geography : as both geographical and cultural  entities - to say nothing of historical entities - such locales, regions , geographical sectors as "orient" and "occident" are man made".

   In the first place, it would be wrong to conclude that the orient was essentially an idea , or a creation with no corresponding  reality.

A second qualification is that ideas , cultures and histories cannot seriously  be understood or studied without their force, or more precisely their configurations of power, also being studied.

 This brings us to a third qualification one ought never to consume that the structure or orientalism is nothing more than a structure of lies or of myths which, were the truth about them to be told, would simply blow away.

 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 relationships with the orient without ever losing him the relatives upper hand.

The distinction between pure and political knowledge : 

 One reason for saying that a humanist who writes about words worth , or an editor whose specialty is Keats, is not involve in anything political is that what he does seems to have no direct political effect upon reality in the everyday sense nevertheless the determining impingement on most knowledge produced in the contemporary west is that it be non-political that is, scholarly, academic, impartial, above partisan or small - minded doctrinal belief.

 Fore orientalism brings one  up directly against that question - that is, to realizing  that political imperialism governs an entire field of study , imagination, and scholarly institutions - in such a way as to makes its avoidance an intellectual and historical impossibility.

The methodological question :  

 A major lesson I learned and  tried to present was that there is no such thing  as a merely given, or simply available , starting point : beginning have to be made for each project in such a way as to enable what follows from them.

 Yet what German orientalism had in common with Anglo French and later American orientalism was a kind of intellectual authority over the orient within western culture. There is nothing mysterious or natural about authority.

My principal methodological devices for studding authority here are what can be called  strategic  location , which is a way of describing the author's position in a text with regard to the oriental material he writes about, and strategic formation, which is a way of analyzing the relationship between text and the way in which groups of texts, types of texts, even textual genres, acquire mass density , and referential power among themselves and thereafter in the culture at large. He is never concerned with the orient except as the first cause of what he says.

   Another reason for insisting upon exteriority is that I believe it needs to be made clear about cultural discourse and exchange within a culture that what is commonly circulated by it is not "truth" but representations.

  For students of literature and criticism, orientalism offers a marvellous instance of the interrelations between society history, and textuality ; moreover, the cultural role played by the orient in the west connects orientalism with ideology, politics, and the logic of power, matters of relevance , I think, to the literary community.

  There are two sets of problems that I'd like to take up, each of them deriving from the general issues addressed in orientalism , of which the most important are : the representation of other cultures , societies , histories ; the relationship between power and knowledge ; the role of the intellectual ; the methodological questions that have to do with the relationships between text and context between text and history.

as a department of thought and expertise , orientalism of course refers to several overlapping domains first , the changing historical and cultural relationship between Europe and Asia , a relationship with a 4000 years old history secondly , the scientific discipline in the west according to which beginning in the study of various oriental cultures and traditions and thirdly , the ideological supposition , images , and fantasies about a currently important and politically urgent region of the world called the orient.

In short , orientalism  reconsidered in this wider and libertarian optic entails nothing less than the creation of new objects for a new kind of knowledge. 

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