Name: Dave Mayuri P.
Roll No: 13.
Paper no: 11.The Post-colonial Literature.
Topic name: What is Orientalism ?
Submitted By: Department of English.(M.K.B.U)
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What is Orientalism?
Introduction of Edward Said :-
Edward said was born on 1st
November, 1935 Jerusalem, tsreal.and died on 24st sepetember, 2003 New York
City, New York united states. Edward said was a Palestinian American literary
theorist and public intellectual who helped found the critical theory field of Post
colonialism. Orientalism by Edward said is a foundational text for the academic
field of post-colonial studies.
What is Orientalism?
According to said,
“Orientalism dates from the
period of European enlightenment and colonization of the Arab world Orientalism
provided a rationalization for European colonialism based on a
self-serving history in which “the
west”constructed “the east” as extremely different and inferior, and
intervention or rescue.”
Orientalism as a term :-
Orientalism is a term
used by art historians and literary and cultural studies scholars for the
imitation of aspects of Middle Eastern and east Asian cultures by writers,
designers and artists from the west.
Orientalism the word comes
from the orient. Orient came into the English from middle French orient.
For example:- early orientalism can be seen in
European paintings and photographs and also in images from the world’s fair in the U.S.in the 19th
century and early 20th centuries depict the Arab worls.as an exotic
and mysterious place of sand. Harems and belly dancers all those are reflecting
a long history of orientalism fantasies.
As demonstrated in, the
colonial harem, this photography were circulated as evidence of the exotic,
backwards and strange customs of Algerians, when in fact they reveal more about
the French colonial perspective than about Algerian life in the early 1900s. Of
how Arab women have been erotized for the pleasure of the European male voyeur,
as these photographs makes visible French colonial fantasies.
Orientalism :-
Orentalism can be discussed and
analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the orient dealing with
it by making statements about it, authorizing view of it, describing it,by
teaching short orientalism as a western style for dominating, restructuring and
having authority over the orient.
-Edward said.
The word orientalist and orientalism
broadly described something a kind words to what we known how as, “area
studies.” said outlines…what he perceived to be the consistent patterns of
orientalism in European literature; the throughout literature all image of the
east derive not from actual encounters or direct knowledge. But the creation
and affirmation or preconceived, resulting in a indigenized orient, instead of
an actual /east.
The orient as almost a European
invention, and had been
since anti quality a place of romance exotic begins, haunting memories and
landscapes, remarkable experiences.
“one of the most important thing
Is that orient has helped
to define
Europe.”
And can we say that none of this orient
is merely imaginative.
Reasonable qualification:-
Said said that..
1st qualification; - it would be
wrong to conclude that the orient was essentially an idea, or accretion with no
correspond reality.
2nd
qualification: - ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be
understood or studied without their configuration of power.
There are
three aspect of contemporary reality:-
1. The distinction between pure and
political knowledge.
2. The methodological question.
3. The personal dimension.
1).The distinction between pure and political knowledge:-
It is very easy to argue that knowledge
about Shakespeare or words worth is not political whereas knowledge about
contemporary china or the Soviet Union is. Humanist who writes about words
worth, or an Editor whose Specialty is Keats, is not involved in anything
political is that he does seems to have no direct political effect upon reality
in the everyday sense.
The determining
impingement on most knowledge produced in the contemporary west is that it be
non political, above partisan or small-minded doctrinal belief. Who produces
it, yet this knowledge is not therefore automatically nonpolitical. Political
significance is a very large question that I have tried to treat in some detail
elsewhere. What I am interested in doing now is suggesting how the general
liberal consensus that “true” knowledge is fundamentally non-political.(and
conversely, that overtly political
knowledge is not true knowledge.) obscures the highly it obscurely organized political
circumstances obtaining when knowledge is produced.
Orientalism is not mere political subject matter or field
that is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions; nor is it
a large and diffuse collection of text about the orient: nor is representative
and expressive of some nefarious “western” imperialist plot to hold down the
“orient” world. It is rather a distribution of geopolitical and philological
reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological disorient it
not only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than express. A creation
will or cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly
different world; it is ,above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct,
corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced
and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a
degree by the exchange with power political (as with colonial or imperial
establishment), power intellectual as with reigning since like comparative
Linguistics or anatomy, or any of the modern policy since power cultural (as
with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values) power moral (as with ideas
about what “we” do and what “they” cannot do or understand as “we” do).
Oreintalism is and does not
simply represent a considerable dimension of modern political intellectual culture,
and as such has less to do with the orient than it does with “our” world.
“orientalism is a cultural and a political fact,” then, it does not exist in
some archival vacuum; quite the contrary, I think it can be shown that what is
thought, said or even done about the orient follows certain distinct and
intellectually knowledge lines.
Orientalism brings one up
directly against that question is, to realizing that political imperialism
governs an entire field of study, imagination and scholarly institutions-in
such a way as to make its avoidance an intellectual and historical
impossibility. A literary scholar and philosopher, for example, are trained in
literature and philosophy respectively, not in politics or ideological analysis.
In other works the specialist argument can work quite effectively to block the
more intellectually serious perspective.
Orientalism as a dynamic
exchange between individual authors and the large political concerns shaped by
the three great empires British, French, and American. An Whose intellectual
and imaginative territory the writing was produced.
2).The
methodological question:-
Analysis to the
methodological importance for work in the human sciences of finding and
formulating a first step, a point of departure a beginning principle Learned
and tried to present was that there is no such thing as a merely given or
simply available, striating points: beginnings have to be made for each project
in such away as to enable what follows from them.
Orientalism are amply made
up for there has been some important recent work on the background in biblical
scholarship to the rise of what I have modern orientalism. Germen orientalism
had in common with Anglo-French and later American orientalism was a kind of
intellectual position in nineteenth century Europe.
Principle methodological
device for studying authority here are what can be called strategic located
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 texts and the way in which groups of texts,
types of texts, even textual genres, acquire mass, destiny, and referential
power among themselves and thereafter in the culture at large.
Orientalism offers a marvelous
instance of the inter-relations between society, history, and textuality;
moreover, the cultural role played by the orient in west connects orientalism
with ideological, politics and the logic power, matter of relevance, to the
literary community. For the general readers, this study deals with matters that
always compel attention, all of them connected not only with western conception
and treatments of the other but also with the singularly important role played
by western culture.
3). The
personal dimension:-
The personal investment in
this study derives from my awareness child growing up in two British colonies.
In many ways study of orientalism has been an attempt to inventory the traces
upon me, the oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so
powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals.
“East” has always signifies
danger and threat during this period, even as it has meant the traditional orient
as well as Russian. In the universities a growing establish of area- studies
programs and institutes has made the scholarly study of the orient a branch of
national policy. Public affairs In this strategic and economic importance as
for its traditional exoticism.
One aspect of the
electronic post modern world is that there has been a reinforcement of the
stereotype by which the orient is viewed. So far as the orient is concerned,
standardization and cultural stereotyping have intensified the hold of the
nineteenth century academic and imaginative demonology of “the mysterious
orient”.
There are
three principles of orientalism as Said defines it..
1)The east is different from the west.
2)The west is better than east.
3)All Easter cultures are similar.
Conclusion:-
Said concludes that the situation
is the triumph of Orientalism, the degree that even Orientals themselves start to speak the
languages of Orientalism. Yet there is hope: in the critical thinking in modern
universities. Sort of. Today in human Sciences to provide that could dispense
with insights, methods, and ideas that could dispense with racial, and ideological,
and imperialist stereotypes of the sort provided during its historical
ascendancy by Orientalism.
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