Orientalism

3.1 Latent and Manifest Orientalism

In this section, Said applies the psychoanalytic concepts of latent and manifest content to Orientalism to describe the unconscious views of Orientalists and the conscious embodiment of those views. Latent Orientalism is always conservative and repetitive, and consists of a will to power over the Orient. Manifest Orientalism consists of an Orientalist determination to “reveal” the Orient through its study, leading to the creation of Western administrative imperatives over the East. Said refers to latent and manifest Orientalism to show how the unconscious views of Orientalists contribute to attitudes and actions toward the East.

Some of the instances of latent Orientalism that Said refers to are the racialization and gendering of Orientals. Said notes that Orientalist thinkers relied on racial classification to distinguish Orientals from Europeans. Orientalists also presumed a general “maleness” of Orientals (207), reducing the Orient to a single gender identity without reproductive capabilities. The generalizing attitudes of latent Orientalism are evident in British Statesman George Nathaniel Curzon’s views on Oriental Studies as an academic discipline. According to Curzon, there is a British responsibility to the Orient. This latent sense of responsibility justified the cultivation of Oriental Studies as a significant field of study. Curzon stated that Oriental Studies was “the necessary furniture of Empire” (215), suggesting that the discipline was a means of establishing British presence across the Orient. The latent sense of British responsibility to the Orient also contributed to the formalization of Orientalist scholarship and the development of policy.

3.2 Style, Expertise, Vision: Orientalism’s Worldliness

According to Said, the style of Orientalist writing depended upon generalizations about Orientals and the creation of an “Oriental type” (248). These generalizations either presented Orientals as projections of Western desires or threats to Western stability. These attitudes were especially prevalent in the development of 19th-century scientific racism. Said offers the example of Rudyard Kipling’s figure of the “White Man,” who was used to justify Western colonial intervention in the Orient because he believed that Oriental cultures could not rule themselves. The incapability of countries in the Orient to self-govern was also an attitude shared by T. E. Lawrence, who believed the Arab to be a primitive figure. For Lawrence, the Arab existed “in the definition” of his name and “in reality” (230), possessing none of the depth and complexity of his European counterpart.

Even attempts to unite the East and West in Orientalist imagination reproduced Western dominance over the Orient. In Said’s continued discussion of Lawrence, he notes how the British writer wrote about the Arab Revolt of 1916-18 by staging the political upheaval through his Western imagination. He equated himself with “the struggle of a new Asia to be born” (243), suggesting that the West depended upon knowing the Orient to reify its identity. In this instance, the political resistance by Arabs was relevant to Lawrence only for how it served his Western imagination.

Said states again that the style of Orientalist writing, whether it produced firm distinctions between East and the West or encouraged its union, still retained the sense of Western dominance. In modern Orientalism, this hierarchy operated as a liberal enterprise.

3.3 Modern Anglo-French Orientalism in Fullest Flower

After World War II, Western interest in the Orient increased, as did its liberal imperative to intervene in cultures not one’s own. This liberal imperative contributed to the shaping of Islam from the Western perspective. For Scottish historian Hamilton Alexander Rosskeen Gibb, the study of Islam was part of a “new rising dialectic of cultural self-consciousness” (257). However, despite the liberal investment in knowing the Orient, Gibb opposed the idea of nationalism in Islamic states, not because of a lack of sympathy for political action but due to his belief that Islam possessed an unwillingness to change. His belief and writing about Islam’s fixity contributed to the reformulation of Islam as a traditional and private religion and culture.

Even Gibb’s sympathetic view of Islam had lasting detrimental effects on present views and attitudes. This was also the case in French scholar Louis Massignon’s work. A defender of Islam and supporter of Palestinian refugees, Massignon’s work observed the coexistence of multiple faiths. However, despite drawing from liberal values to inform his views, Massignon still positioned the Orient in the past and the West as a modern power in his work. He also framed political unrest tied to Islamic states as an issue between Semitic populations, omitting the impact of Christianity throughout history from his purview.

3.4 The Latest Phase

In this last section of the third chapter, Said describes the impact of Orientalism on present representations of and policies regarding Arab and Islamic populations. In American popular culture, the figure of the Arab “slave trader, camel driver, money changer, [and] colorful scoundrel” (287) is prevalent especially as Arabs become more heavily associated with oil and international commerce. As the US emerged as a world power in the 20th century, it followed the Orientalist example set by European powers before them. The US began to invest in cultural-relations efforts and policies to contain and preside over Islamic states. Like their European predecessors, American humanities scholars such as Mortimer Graves pursued knowledge of the Orient so that the US could gain political control over the territories. Graves was especially an advocate for cultivating a “cultural relations policy” wherein it was an American imperative to amass “every significant publication in every important Near Eastern language publication since 1900” (295).

According to Said, the US presently occupies the influential position over Islamic states that European powers once had: The US now has the intellectual influence that Britain and France once had. As part of this shift, there persists a lack of proportion in studies of the Middle East and Asia. In terms of scholarship of Arab cultures, Arabs must rely on the dominance of Western knowledge production to attend to their own histories. Western knowledge production retains the inequities installed through years of Orientalist activity.

While Said believes that divisions between the West and the East are too historically embedded to erode, he argues that one should consider knowledge of the world beyond Orientalist terms. Rather than divisions and constant deference to Western knowledge, he hopes that new academic and political methods can and will consider new and more humane perspectives.