Edward Said On Orientalism

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Edward Said

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Jan 25, 08 By: jarhood

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Posted Jan 25, 08 by Mudhooks
I find it interesting that one of the criticisms of Said's "theory" is that he would have been better to use India and the Far East as his examples...

"These critics suggested that Said devoted much less attention to more apt examples, including the British more...Raj in India, and Russia’s dominions in Asia"...

The point, of course, in Said's theory is that the West has lumped the "Middle East", the Near East", India, and the Far East into one category.... "The Orient". The fact is that The Raj, the Far East, and other areas have been well studied and the area that he chooses have not been.

In fact, as his theory postulates, the supposed "scholarly study" of the Middle East - specifically Palestine and Egypt - have been one of the root causes of the misinterpretation of that area of the world.

How many histories of India, most especially India after the arrival of the British have there been? How many books on the social history of India?

I would quite agree with Said that the West has always dealt, in literature, art, historical study, from the romantic point of view.

When you consider that Egypt and Palestine, historically, were on the circuit for the Grand Tour for the educated and/or wealthy European for well over 300 years and that the "romantic" was what the European sought rather than the factual, that is what how European chose to approach the Middle East in its writing and its art.

In India, the vast majority of Westerners, particularly the English, arrived in India as part of the European "machine". For the majority, their entire experience in India was within the Colonial machine. Few stepped outside the circle of wagons that was the Raj. For them, there was little "romance" to India.

Whereas, in the Middle East, the main purpose in traveling or living there was to "immerse oneself" in the culture but only in the highly romanticized culture that only existed in the mind of the European.

Of course, there was also the need to protect the European and, later, American interests, especially during the Ottoman Empire's involvement in the region, after the building of the Suez Canal and during both World Wars.

While of immense economic importance, India wasn't of particular strategic importance during the British occupation and only during and after WWII did it become of strategic military importance and by then, it had its own strong and almost wholly Allied-friendly military complex. less

Posted Jan 25, 08 by Mudhooks
The West's flaw in dealing with the Middle East has ALWAYS been its complete and utter inability to understand and deal with the various powers.

One only has to look at the way in which the British, French, American and others sliced up the Middle East more...

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