Race & Orientalism

Edward Said

• Father was a wealthy, Palestinian Christian book merchant, had offices in many countries

– Went to English high school in Cairo, boarding school in New England, Princeton, Harvard

• Was a comparative literature professor

– 1967 victory by Israel made him interested in Arab, Palestinian issues

• 1977 elected to Palestinian Congress in exile

– Argued for non-violence resistance, for humanism, respect for Israelis as people

• Eventually became professor at Columbia

• Orientalism is released in 1978

– Highly influential in literary, social sciences as an intellectual history

– Also had a large number of detractors, considered it a polemic (where argument takes precedent over balanced, deep research), but pretty well accepted now

• Most public fight was with Bernard Lewis

Major Orientalists

• As Said stated in Orientalism, although all Orientalists contributed to the same discourse, some of the authors were more careful than others. For example, take two British authors

• Edward Lane

– Author: Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians

– He went to Egypt to treat illness, lived among Egyptians in a respectful way for years and wrote a careful book

• Richard Burton

– Author: Pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, translator of the Kama Sutra

– Master linguist, often gained access to places disguise.

– Was an opium addict, sex addict, and murdered people in order to keep his disguises.

• Even though Lane’s knowledge is obviously more trustworthy than Burton’s, both were treated as equal authority.

Stuart Hall

• Major figure in British Cultural studies

– Was born in Jamaica; won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford

• Founded the influential journal New Left Review

• From positions and University of Birmingham and Open University, helped pushed cultrual studies towards contemporary media represenation, race, and gender.

Questions to guide reading of Orientalism and Hall

• What are Said’s three meanings of Orientalism, and how are they different? (pg 2)

• Is Orientalism a set of lies that can be simply eliminated by telling the truth? Why or why not? (pg 5-6)

• What is “positional superiority”? (pg 7)

• What does mean when he says “there is such a thing as knowledge which is less, rather than more, partial… yet this knowledge is not therefore automatically apolitcal” and why does that statement run counter to the ideal of how academic work is thought to be done? (pg 10)

• Said on pg 12 says Orienatlism is “a distribution of geopolitical awareness into…” Into what?

• On page 27, how did his personal situation motivate him to write the book?

• On page 54, does Said feel the tendency to divide “our” land from “others” (through an “imaginative geography”) universal? What does it mean when he says “the sense of what is not foreign is based on a very unrigorous idea of what is out there beyond one’s own territory.”

• On page 58, how does seeing new things “as versions of previously known things” connect to his assertion on 62 that “it is finally Western ignorance which becomes more refined and complex”?

• On 63 and 71, Said deploys a “theatrical metaphor” to talk about the Orient as a stage? Explain why it is a stage (hint: has something to do with being limited) and who that stage is for?

• According to Hall, why is media particularly central to the production of ideology? (pg 19)

• Is media simply the “ventriloquists” of a unified, racist ruling class? What is “inferential racism”? (pg 20)

• Hall names three “figures” that are frequent in media portrayals (if not overtly now, but in traces). What are they, and why are they examples of “primitivism” (pg 21-22)?