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Edward SaidOrientalism
Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 1978A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Binary Opposition Between Orient and Occident
Content Warning: The source text uses terms that are now considered outdated and offensive such as “the Orient,” “Orientalism,” and “oriental.” Said uses these terms to critique these concepts, and this study guide reproduces them in that critical context.
Said expresses the relationship between the Orient and the Occident as one of binary opposition. The concept of binary opposition originated with Ferdinand de Saussure, a seminal figure in structuralist theory, who defined it as two ideas that depend on one another for definition but are theoretically opposed. This dependency and opposition articulate the historical and theoretical bind in the relationship between the Orient (the East) and the Occident (the West). Said argues that this bind is maintained by the dominant Occidental powers that have always relied on the Orient to fortify its own identity. In other words, Britain and France’s colonial projects in the Orient bolstered their identities as imperialist nations, in part because these European nations defined themselves in opposition to the conquered Other.
By creating and maintaining a binary opposition between the Orient and the Occident, the West defined itself through its distinctions from the values of the East. In a 1972 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, US government official Harold W. Glidden penned an essay in which he described Arabs in the Middle East as “characterized by anxiety expressed in generalized suspicion and distrust, which has been labelled free-floating hostility” (49). In this instance, the Orient is positioned as perpetually hostile, mistrustful, and against peace. This is juxtaposed against the West, which values peace. The West is considered, “rational, peaceful, liberal, logical, capable of holding real values” (49), whereas the Arab individual possesses the opposite traits. By distinguishing the Orient from the West in such a way, the US creates an image of a hostile Middle East to bolster its national image as a peacemaker. Said draws on this binary opposition between the Orient and the Occident throughout Orientalism to speak to how the tension between the two spaces has persisted throughout history. While Orientalist works proliferate over time, the values propagated by the West about the East remain unchanged.
These stereotypes persist to this day, especially in the post-9/11 United States, where anti-Muslim soundbites like “Islam is a religion of hate” and “they hate us for our freedoms” were common in both the media and in daily conversation. Anti-Muslim stereotypes, rooted in centuries of Orientalist thinking, are used to perpetuate the continued subjugation of Arab people abroad and within the United States, from ongoing wars and bombing campaigns in the Middle East to illegal surveillance of Muslim Americans in cities like New York (“Factsheet: The NYPD Muslim Surveillance Program” ACLU, 17 Jun. 2013).
The Power of the Colonial Imagination
In Said’s discussion of Orientalism, the 18th and 19th centuries are crucial periods for modernizing Orientalist thinking. During these centuries, imperialism and colonial activity constituted a Western power grab of territories in the Orient. Said argues that the competition to acquire the Orient through knowledge production and political activity can be linked to colonial imagination about the East. Ideas about the Orient, propagated through cultural texts, began before the 18th century. During the height of imperialism and colonial activity, these older ideas about the Orient populated the colonial imagination and continued to inform political views about the East in the present day.
The power of colonial imagination emerges across fields and genres, permeating different aspects of intellectual and artistic life. Said demonstrates this in Orientalism by citing a wide variety of texts and thinkers. Some of them, like archaeology and philology, are more scientific and are easy to link to politics; excerpts from Ernest Renan and Silvestre de Sacy show how Orientalist viewpoints about Eastern cultures’ inferiority informed imperialist hierarchies and decisions made by figures like Napoleon Bonaparte and Arthur James Balfour. However, he is equally concerned with how the humanities depict the Orient, citing the ways that literature, philosophy, and theology manufacture ideas of the Orient. He points to the term “Oriental” itself as justified by the English literary canon: “[I]t had been employed by Chaucer and Mandeville, by Shakespeare, Dryden, Pope, and Byron. It designated Asia or the East, geographically, morally, culturally” (31-32). With this, Said outlines how Orientalism is an interdisciplinary practice and idea, mutually created and shaped by political domination and cultural output.
Colonial cultural imagination is so powerful that it creates an entirely new version of the Orient that is separate from the actual nations and cultures that exist in the Near East. As Said notes, “that Orientalism makes sense at all depends more on the West than on the Orient, and this sense is directly indebted to various Western techniques of representation that make the Orient visible” (21-22). In other words, Western knowledge production—which includes such diverse texts as “regulatory codes, classifications, specimen cases, periodical reviews, dictionaries, grammars, commentaries, editions, [and] translations” (166)—about the Orient allows Western people feel they know and understand the Orient without ever having been there or interacted with its people. This creates a perpetual cycle of flattening and othering, dehumanizing practices handed down within an Orientalist culture.
The Political Ramifications of Cultural Production
In Said’s introduction to Orientalism, he notes that literary critics typically eschew political contexts that lie beyond the text in their criticism. He is speaking of New Criticism, which dominated literary thinking in the midcentury and stated that only the words on the page contributed to a work’s meaning. To New Critics, policy and governmental structures have little to do with literature and the arts. However, Said expresses that this “distinction between pure and political knowledge” diminishes the political potential of cultural texts (9). As part of Said’s main thesis for Orientalism, Western cultural production does not merely exist as “pure” objects but contributes to the creation of administrative policies and institutions regarding the Orient. As such, to understand Orientalism is to recognize the political capacity of cultural works.
Said stresses this idea throughout the text, discussing how the cultural archive is an integral aspect of colonization; the colonizer diminishes or erases the colonized’s culture while uplifting their own, maintaining political and social hierarchies through cultural production. In doing so, Orientalist thinkers not only perpetuate their ideas about Near East cultures but create the framework for continued imperialist domination. As Said notes, expertise becomes a political tool: “The authority of academics, institutions, and governments can accrue to it, surrounding it with still greater prestige than its practical successes warrant” (94). In other words, academic study lends credibility to Orientalist ideas and promotes the dissemination of these ideas, whether through physical violence or cultural suppression.
In creating the Orient—the other—European powers divided the world into East and West, Occident and Orient. Said asserts that even as these Western nations warred with each other, creating a common inferior other served their political purposes. Since neither nation wanted to start an eternal war over Eastern territories, creating a shared justification and methodology for imperialist oppression allowed each to profit from domination. As such, perpetuating Orientalist ideas and cultural products created a self-perpetuating justification for Western exploitation while maintaining political stability in the West. The result, as Said notes, is a more global dehumanization of non-white, non-Western populations. The ramifications of this persist to this day, even as England and France have lost most of their colonies. He ends Orientalism by asserting that the legacies of Orientalist imperialism persist today, “[I]f not the East/West division, then the North/South one, the have/have-not one, the imperialist/anti-imperialist one, the white/colored one” (327). Arguing against late-20th-century attempts to forget past injustices or pretend they no longer exist, Said advocates for acknowledging past injustices, bringing an antiracist and anti-imperialist lens to cultural production, and actively working to create a different, more just future.
