The scope of orientalism

Orientalism- "The representation of Asia in a stereotyped way that is regarded as embodying a colonialist attitude"- oxford dictionary

The Snake Charmer, Jean-Léon Gérôme; c 1897

Orientalism by Edward Said, 1978 is unquestionably the most enlightening text ever written on 'Orientalism' .

This particular article is an attempt elaborate on the essay,”The Scope of Orientalism” where Said implores us to study Orientalism as an academic discipline and not reduce it to a mere consequence of Western Imperialism.

Edward Said argues that Orientalism was not a consequence of the belief that some nations were incapable of self-governance, that Orientalism and imperialism were occurring simultaneously and that there are epistemological and ontological differences between the East and the West. Said vouches that Orientalism was not a consequence of colonialism, but one of its causes – “To say simply that Orientalism was a rationalization of colonial rule”, Said avers, “is to ignore the extent to which colonial rule was justified in advance by Orientalism, rather than after the fact.” In other words as Chibber puts it, Orientalism was around far before the modern era, and by virtue of its depiction of the East, it created the cultural conditions for the West to embark on its colonial project. The disparity of the setting is visible in presentment of the East as mysterious and passive as compared to the apparent and active West which at its core is done to ostracize and exoticise the East. The promulgation of the outlook that the East is unchanging and has been 'static' across space and time in contrast to the West being the locus of moral and scientific progress causes the alienation of the East reducing it to a mere object to be studied.

According to Said, the Western Orientals structured the world as made of two opposing elements, ‘ours’ and ‘theirs’. These were not just geographical divisions but more importantly epistemological ones.

The West and East were to be cultural distinctions, differences in civilization or lack of it. The available ‘systematic’ knowledge of the Orient is reinforced by the colonial promoting their self-interest throughout the generations.

The self decreed supremacy of the West over the East gives the Western scholars the false agency to think that they are more apt to understand the Orients than the Orients themselves, thus "Orientalising" them and subjecting them to Western hegemony.

The description of the East as “uncivilized” is the pedestal at which the West proclaims its superiority, its own civilization. The Orient is fairly undermined because it is the mirror at which the West looks for self complacency. Deploying the Freudian mechanism of projection, we find that the West delineated East with everything that it did not want to acknowledge about itself onto the Orient to manifest an inferior outlook towards it.

The idea of colonial domination of West raises the question of the birth of Orientalism that emanates from the disciplines of Oriental studies setup by Britain, digging deeper into the cause of imperial subjugation we find that distinction ‘Other’ was ‘visible’ in European literature since the time of Aeschylus, Dante, and so on. Said also notes the period of immense advance in the institutions and content of Orientalism coincides exactly with the period of unparalleled European expansion. For Said, Imperialism and Orientalism cannot be seen as separate entities, but interdependent, influencing one another. Said‘s basic intention is to show that Orientalism cannot be taken as a free subject of thought or action. ‘Orient‘ is something, which has largely been ‘imagined‘ and ‘constructed‘ in some, essentialised terms, rather than ‘studied‘ or ‘analysed‘.

According to Frankberg, round the late 18th century an Oriental renaissance took place with a wide variety of artists, writers, thinkers taking an active role in understanding the newly translated Oriental texts in languages like Sanskrit, Zend and Arabic. This new dissemination of Orientalism evoked a new interest in Oriental studies and gave scholars an uncountable list of philological works to choose from.

This is what describes Orientalism as an academic discipline making it a rather approachable concept, a theatrical stage affixed to Europe. Orient now becomes a metaphor for the stage and the West becomes the director/playright. Since proper knowledge about the Orient could be retrieved from a thorough study of the classical texts, the Orient started to exist as a set of values attached to a series of valorised contacts with the distant European past. “Such an Orient was silent, available to Europe for the realization of projects that involved but were never directly responsible to the native inhabitants, and unable to resist the projects, images, or mere descriptions devised for it”, he remarks, and teasing through this scholarship‘s sources in the ancient Greco-Roman classics, the Bible, and the following literary traditions of Renaissance to Modernism, he accuses the West of limiting its archives for constructing the Orient to suit its own fictional and presumptive projections of the Orient.

Thus Said, "illustrates how throughout history the Occidental archive is built up from the literature that belongs to a restricted number of typical encapsulations: the journey, the history, the fable, the stereotype, the polemical confrontation." This language and the perceived notions through literature enable the experience that the West has of the Orient and it also shapes the encounter between the two. Hence, the Modern Orientalist’s “Orient is not the Orient as it is, but the Orient as it has been Orientalized.”