Edward said Orientalism.

Assignment- E-E 305: The postcolonial literature.

Topic- Edward said Orientalism.

Name- Vadher Ankita.

Roll no- 12.

Sem- 3

Batch-   2011-12.

Submitted To,

Dr. Dilip Barad,

Bhavnagar University,

Bhavnagar.

Edward was visited to Beirut during the civil war of 1975 and also says a French journalist wrote regretfully of the gutted downtown area that “it had once seemed to belong to the orient of chateaubriand and nerval. He was right about the place and especially so far as a European was concerned. The orient was almost a European invention and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic being haunting memories and landscapes remarkable experiences had sometime at stake in the process that even in the time of chateaubriand and nerval oriental had lived there and that now it was they who were suffering the main thing for the European visitor was a European representation of the orient and its contemporary fate, both of which had a privileged communal significance for the journalist and his French readers. Americans will not feel quite about the orient which for them is much more likely to be associated very differently with the far east the Americans unlike the French and the British-less so the Germans, Russian, Spanish Portuguese, Italians and Swiss have had a long tradition of what I shall be calling Oriental a way of coming to terms with the orient that is based on the orient’s special place in European western experience. Orient has helped to define Europe as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. The orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture. Orientalism express and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrine and colonial styles. Orientals lives on academically through its doctrines and these about the orient and the oriental. Related to this academic tradition and transmission is in part the subject of this study orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the orient” and “the occident”. The interchange between the academic and the more or less imaginative meaning of orientalism is a constant one and since the late eighteenth century. There has been a considerable quit disciplined perhaps even regulated traffic between the two. Here he came to the third meaning of orientalism which is something more historically and materially defined than either of the other two, orientalism as a western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the orient. Edward have found it useful hereto employ Michel Foucault’s notion of a discourse, as described by him in the archaeology of knowledge and in discipline and punish to identify orientalism. From the beginning of the nineteenth century until the end of the world war two France and Britain dominated the orient and orientalism; world war two America has dominated the orient and approaches it as France and Britain once did. Orient is not an inert fact of nature. There is in addition the hegemony of European ideas about the orient themselves reiterating. European superiority over oriental backwardness usually overruling. Little resistance on the orient’s part. Edward mentioned three aspects of his contemporary reality: he must explain and briefly discuss them now, so that it can be seen how he was lead to a particular course of research and writing.

v The distinction between pure and political knowledge:

                                                     It is very easy to argue that knowledge about Shakespeare or Wordsworth is not political. Whereas knowledge about contemporary China or the Soviet Union is his own formal and professional designation is that of “humanist” a title which indicates the humanities as his field and therefore the unlikely eventuality that three might be anything political about what he do in that field. The distinction between “humanists” and person whose work has policy implication or political significance can be broadened further by saying that the former’s ideological color is a matter of incidental importance to politics, whereas the ideology of the letter is woven directly into his material indeed, economics, politics, and sociology in the modern academy are ideological sciences and therefore taken for granted as being “political”. The kind of political questions rose by orientalism, and then is as follows. What other sorts of intellectual aesthetic, scholarly and culture energies went in to the making of an imperialist tradition like the orienatlists one?  How did philosophy lexicography history biology, political and economic theory, novel writing and lyric poetry come to the service of orientalism broadly imperialist view of the word? He does orientalism tradition or reproduces itself from one epoch to another? Edward argument is that each humanistic investigation must formulate the nature of that connection in the specific context of the study the subject matter and its historical circumstances.

v The methodological question:

                                 Edward analysis to the methodological importance for work in the human science of finding and formulation a first step a point of departure a beginning principle “a major lesson. The idea of beginning indeed the act of beginning necessarily involves an act of delimitation by which something is cut out of a great mass of material separated from the mass and made to stand for as well as be a starting point a beginning for the student of texts one such notion of inaugural delimitation is Louis althuser’s ideas of the problematic a specific determinate unity of a text, or group of texts, which is something given rise to by analysis Britain and France dominated the eastern Mediterranean from about the end of the seventeenth century on. In the second place and here the failing of my study of orientalism are amply made up for there has been some important recent wore on the background in biblical scholarship to the rise of what he have called modern orientalism. German and orientalism had in common with Anglo-French and later American orientalism was a kind of intellectual authority over the orient within western culture. According to Edward analyses employ close textual readings whose goal is to reveal the dialectic between individual text or writer and the complex collective formation to which his work is a contribution. Orientalism now beings where its predecessor left off at around 1870. This is the period of great colonial expansion in to the orient and it culminates in world war two.

v The personal dimension:

                     Gramsci says: “the starting point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really knowing you as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces without leaving an inventory”. The only available English translation inexplicably leaves grimace’s comment at that however have he ever lost hold of the culture reality of the personal involvement in having been constituted as “an oriental”. The historical circumstances making such a study possible are fairly complex and he can only list them schematically. Here anyone resident in the west since the 1950 century. Particularly in the united states will have live through an era of extraordinary turbulence in the relation of east and west no one will have failed to note how “east” has always signified danger and during this period even as it has meant the traditional orient as well as Russia. The nexus of knowledge and power creating “the oriental’ and in a sense obliterating him as a human beings is therefore not for an exclusively academic matter yet it is an intellectual matter of some very obvious importance. It has regularly seemed otherwise to him, the certainly his study of orientalism has convinced him that society and literary culture can only be understood and studied together. Anti Semitism and as he has discussed it in its Islamic branch orientalism resemble each other very closely is a historical culture and political truth that needs only to be mentioned to an Arab Palestinian for its irony to be perfectly understood. But what he should like also to have contribution here is a better understanding of the way cultural domination has operated. If it eliminates the “orient” and “occident” although then we shall have advance a little in the process of what Raymond Williams has called the “unlearning” of “the inherent dominative mode?.”