Trent Carl IWS 192 Orientalism Defined In Orientalism Edward Said offers a number of definitions for the term

Orientalism itself. While the first thought that may come to mind may be that multiple definitions leads to confusion, Said addresses the term a number of times to bring greater clarity to what he means by Orientalism before he undertakes his deeper analysis. This essay will briefly discuss the ways that Edward Said narrows his scope of study and further explains what the scholarly institution of Orientalism is. Said's first description of Orientalism he mentions how the French and the British have had a long scholarly tradition of a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient's special place in European Western experience1. Here Orientalism is being placed in the context of European, specifically British and French, academia and cultural experience. Said mentions France and Britain because of their large colonial forces and conquests. Later he will bring American Orientalism into the same fold but he mentions that this doesn't develop into the same practice that the French and British practice was defined by until, roughly, after World War II which is when the United States becomes a major playerrather the dominant playerin the geopolitics of the Orient itself. Similarly, other European nations didn't acquire the same type of Orientalist scholarship that the British and French did in the sense that their national interest didn't melt into the scholarly field in, for instance Germany, because [t]here was nothing in Germany to correspond to the Anglo-French presence in India, the Levant, North Africa.2 It should be made clear that the Orient is constructed in opposition or in light of the Occident, the

1 Edward Said, Orientalism, (New York: Random House, Inc. 1978), p. 1. 2 Ibid, p. 19.

Trent Carl IWS 192 West. There is a distinction made between civilizations; the developed, European West and everything else. The idea of the Orient is actually constructed in light of the Western perception and its relationship in the mind of the European Scholar can be seen, according to Said, as one that in turn helped define Europe in contradistinction to all else in the East, the Orient. However, it should not be confused that the relationship mentioned above was one brought on by Orientals, or people living in the Orient, but, as I stated, it is the relationship imagined or represented by an Orientalist, a European scholar studying the Orient. So what does the earlier idea of colonialism have to do with any of this? The idea that the Orient was constructed in light of the Occident begs the question, how? The relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony3. The fact that Europe was able to fully define the Orient, in ways that still pervade our common perception and the academic perception of the Orient today, indicates hegemony. This dominating power was not limited to colonialism but, as Orientalism is, it extended to all fields of academic study. 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 relative upper hand.4 The Europeans felt that the Orient could not represent itself, or perhaps never gave it the chance to represent itself because of the political situation of colonialism. Said whittled down the definition of Orientalism to being the academic study of the Orient by, primarily, British, French and American scholars because of the political situation that

3 Ibid, p. 5. 4 Ibid, p. 7.

Trent Carl IWS 192 they worked within, the political culture of domination. After giving a long, detailed explanation of how the intellectual field of Orientalism works he states that Orientalism is...a considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture (emphasis added). Some may say that Orientalism is just an academic practice and it doesn't matter that many of these Orientalist academics came from and lived within a country that dominated the subject of study. Said addressed this retort by stating, No one has ever devised a method for detaching the scholar from the circumstances of life, from the fact of his involvement (conscious or unconscious) with a class, a set of beliefs, a social position, or from the mere activity of being a member of a society.5 In other words, one's situation and development helps to shape one's beliefs and prejudices (or lack thereof) which shapes one's perception of the world, even in an academic situation. Sometimes one's work can come back to reinforce the beliefs that one already holds. Edward Said synthesized a number of ideas to create his definition of Orientalism. First, he narrowed the Orientalism that he was going to address to Anglo-French-American Orientalism. Secondly he discussed how Orientalism was a way of distinguishing Western culture and civilization from everything else, the Orient. The cornerstone of his definition is his discussion on the relationship between knowledge and power, not just military power but also cultural power. This leads him to his smallest label, political-intellectual culture; it is not that the imperial culture in which Orientalists live(d) constrained their work but it is that that culture paves (paved) the way for their work to bloom as it does (did).

5 Ibid, p. 10.