On Orientalism
Jhally, Sut
1998 Edward Said: On Orientalism. Northampton, MA : Media Education Foundation.
Notes: DVD Color 40 minutes
Reviewed 30 Apr 2010 by:
Sushumna Kannan
Bangalore 560056 Karnataka, INDIA.
Medium: Film/Video
Subject
Keywords: Said, Edward W. - Orientalism
Asia - Foreign public opinion, Western
Middle East - Foreign public opinion, Western
Asia - Study and teaching
Middle East - Study and teaching
Imperialism
East and West
Said, Edward W., - 1935- - Orientalism
ABSTRACT: The film discusses Edward W. Said’s work. His hypothesis in his book Orientalism is re-presented along with his take on a variety of contemporary issues of cultural, historical and global importance.
"On Orientalism" mainly takes the form of an interview with Edward W. Said on Orientalism, his 1978 book and his latest thoughts on the subject. Sut Jhally of University of Massachusetts, Amherst introduces the film and also chips in, now and then, to tell us a little bit about Said’s work. He begins by telling us that Orientalism created new fields of study such as postcolonial theory and informs us that Said’s concern is to answer the following questions: “Why is it that when we think of the Middle East, we have pre-conceived notions? And how do we understand those different from us?” The film has several sections, titled The Repertory of Orientalism, Orientalism and Empire, American Orientalism, Orientalism Today: The Demonization of Islam in the News and Popular Culture, Orientalism in Action: The Media and the Oklahoma City Bombing, Orientalism and the Palestinian Question.
Said begins with the basics by telling us that there is a lens through which the West looks at the Middle East and distorts the actual reality of the people; “It is motivated.” The lens used, Said calls Orientalism. In response to the interview questions, Said replies in a personalized manner which makes the film interesting for a lot people who have read Said but haven’t interacted directly with him. In response to a question about what triggered his interest in Orientalism, he mentions two things. One, he says, had to do with the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, when the media showed the Israelis as cowardly and not modern, while they fought like anybody else! Secondly, he says, the disparity between his experiences of what being an Arab was, and representations of that, drove him to decide to write a history.
Said then gives us concrete examples of Orientalism—of the repertoire of images, wherein the Middle East is full of sensual woman, monsters and secrets—all of which, he says, have nothing to do with the real Orient, but were simply narratives consistent with themselves. Such narratives, he emphasizes, extended to descriptions by experts and were presented as objective knowledge. According to Said, the images produced by artists and novelists of great repute like Gerard de Nerval and Edward W. Lane conveyed that the Orientals were all the same: that the Orient doesn’t develop; is outside of history, is placid, timeless, still and eternal. He says that all this is simply contradicted by the fact of history and had merely lent to the creation of an ideal other for Europe.
In explaining “Why the Middle East looks the way it does,” Said looks to the historical context and particularly that of imperialistic conquests, where ‘conquering ideologically’ had taken place. He sees the 1798 Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt as the first modern imperial invasion. This is because, says Said, “Napoleon came with not just an enormous army of soldiers, but also scientists, botanists, architects, philologists, biologists and others who were to produce some sort of scientific survey that was not for the use of the Egyptians but the rulers.”
Said then speaks of different kinds of Orientalism and says that the difference consists in the difference between the relationships with what gets called the Orient. He identifies Britain and France (European Orientalism) and the United States (American Orientalism) as involved in the two main kinds of Orientalism, direct in the case of Britain and France and indirect in the American one.
American Orientalism, according to Said, is mostly based on abstractions and is politicized by the presence of Israel for which the America is the main ally; a considerable part of the film is next devoted to this theme. Said insists that everything we read and watch is coloured politically by this Arab-Israeli conflict and America’s take on it. Said next speaks of his book, Covering Islam (the second of his three books conceived as a trilogy, the other two being Orientalism and The Question of Palestine). He tells us that the media coverage always gave a negative impression, something that had not changed years after the book had been written. He mentions the film “Jihad in America” and criticizes what he calls the dominant “irresponsible journalism”. Explicating this, he says “a video where people are seen discussing in Arabic would be understood that they were discussing the destruction of America, while if you knew the language a little bit, you would realize that it has nothing to do about America.” Said sees this as something that is coupled with the demonization of Islam—the act of seeing Islam as synonymous with terror. All of these different phenomena, Said sees as products of the commercial and political interests of America. While there is no investigative reporting, there is only repeating the line of the American government, says Said and that “as a result of all this, the human side of the Arabic world is not to be found.”
The “new American Orientalism” that this film discusses is refreshing and provides Said’s take on a variety of issues. The film shows us clips from movies, press conferences, news coverage and even cartoons to prove its point, all of which make this the film very watchable. An animation clip from Aladdin has him say, “It’s barbaric, but hey, its home,” and so no one can miss the point being made.
Said continues by saying that in movies the Arabs are always villains and fanatics and the dead Muslim bodies are huge in number. He says that the movies present the idea that Islam needs to be stamped out and that the only language Islam understands is violence. Said’s response to terrorism in this film appears balanced; he says, “there are terrorists as there are, everywhere,” and that “in not really mounting a serious critique of all this, the Arabs, according to him, have participated and allowed the misrepresentations.” The 22 Arab countries together don’t have an information policy to try to give a different picture of the Arab countries to the West, we are told.
Said recalls personal experiences, like when during the Oklahoma bombing, all media wanted to talk to him, to see if he had an insight into the bombing that was seen as of Middle Eastern origin without much basis and even discovered later to be of Christian fundamentalist origin. Said does not let us forget that “Indonesia and Saudi Arabia are both Islamic but very different and that Morocco and Algeria are very different.” He recognizes racist clichés of orientalist discourse, in The Sunday Times, London’s headline for the Diana-Dodi Fayed affair which said: “A match made in Mecca.” His examples are precise and serve his case well. He tells us these are the results of Orientalism and persist because of discourse and defines it as “a regulated system of producing knowledge within certain constraints where certain rules have to be observed. Not to use it is virtually impossible.”
Sharing his intellectual influences with us, Said tells us that Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks contains an idea that appeals to him. And that is Gramsci’s idea that history leaves in us an infinity of traces, but no inventory and no orderly guide to it. There is a task of interpretation left: to understand history in terms of others’ as well. Said says that this is his task and one where “unitary identity should be transformed to an identity that includes the other without suppressing the difference.”
Although being very crisply edited, timely and useful, with music that usefully underlines the film-text, the film doesn’t take up critiques of Orientalism. Hence it needs to be seen as an introductory film, helping students to grasp the hypothesis of Orientalism. The film doesn’t tell us why a lot of people stopped reading Said at Orientalism, seeing his other work as repetitive and uninteresting. Said’s thesis relies on certain readings of Foucault (power-knowledge thesis) and Gramsci a bit too much, and describing all of history as a quest for power has left a lot of history unexplained. Alternate understandings of Foucault like that given by the editor Arnold I. Davidson coupled with Said’s thesis could lead us to far more interesting conclusions, but they have simply remained unexplored both in this film and otherwise as well. Moreover, Said’s thesis has in actuality resulted more in conspiracy theories than anything else. In conjunction with ideas like hybridity that postcolonial scholars like Bhabha have proposed, Orientalism remains just an interesting thesis that doesn’t actually produce more questions or research problems. With scholars like Spivak deeming all theoretical knowledge as running counter to the anti-Orientalist agenda, the future of these areas of study simply looks bleak. The followers of Said waver between positions that are anti-theory and at the same seeking subaltern voices. Neither epistemology nor politics has indeed benefited from the thesis of Orientalism.
The thesis of Orientalism prompts us to say that most statements that were expressed about the ‘other’ were purposefully racist and derogatory; that the purpose here was power, power to rule and administrate the other. However a careful look at history will show that such statements have persisted in Western travelers’ accounts from the 15th century on and these travelers and visitors had no intention to rule or conquer. This has been easy to prove, at least in the case of India. In short, the situation has been one where evolving a criteria to understand current Orientalisms is not progressing at all.
The only significant line of thought in recent scholarship that is helpful in this situation is to be found in S. N. Balagangadhara’s work. “How is it a contribution to knowledge, to say that the Europeans were prejudiced against the East, without explaining why they had to necessarily be so?” asks Prof. Balu. Balagangadhara also asks that if Orientalism consisted in wrong representations, then we must be able to come up with a correct understanding of the East, to which postcolonial scholars give meek replies about the evils of essentialism and the quests for origins.
Such dead-ends and problems, however, don’t seem to be within the intentional purview of the film. In this sense, the film is somewhat adulatory of Said. But it should be very useful for beginners, students of Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Theory, Gender Studies, Cultural and Social Anthropology and related disciplines.
References:
Balagangadhara, S. N., lecture titled “Cultural Difference” at Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), Bangalore, Feb 10th 2010.
Balagangadhara, S.N and Marianne Keppens. 2009. "Reconceptualizing the Postcolonial Project: Beyond the Strictures and Structures of Orientalism." Interventions 11 (1): 50–68.
Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.
Foucault, Michel. 2004. Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974-1975. A. I. Davidson, ed. New York: Picador.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1990. The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. Sarah Harasym, ed. London: Routledge.
To cite this review, the American Anthropological Association recommends the following style:
Kannan, Sushumna
2010 Review of Edward Said: On Orientalism. Anthropology Review Database. April 30. Electronic document, http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/cgi/showme.cgi?keycode=3529, accessed May 9, 2010.
1998 Edward Said: On Orientalism. Northampton, MA : Media Education Foundation.
Notes: DVD Color 40 minutes
Reviewed 30 Apr 2010 by:
Sushumna Kannan
Bangalore 560056 Karnataka, INDIA.
Medium: Film/Video
Subject
Keywords: Said, Edward W. - Orientalism
Asia - Foreign public opinion, Western
Middle East - Foreign public opinion, Western
Asia - Study and teaching
Middle East - Study and teaching
Imperialism
East and West
Said, Edward W., - 1935- - Orientalism
ABSTRACT: The film discusses Edward W. Said’s work. His hypothesis in his book Orientalism is re-presented along with his take on a variety of contemporary issues of cultural, historical and global importance.
"On Orientalism" mainly takes the form of an interview with Edward W. Said on Orientalism, his 1978 book and his latest thoughts on the subject. Sut Jhally of University of Massachusetts, Amherst introduces the film and also chips in, now and then, to tell us a little bit about Said’s work. He begins by telling us that Orientalism created new fields of study such as postcolonial theory and informs us that Said’s concern is to answer the following questions: “Why is it that when we think of the Middle East, we have pre-conceived notions? And how do we understand those different from us?” The film has several sections, titled The Repertory of Orientalism, Orientalism and Empire, American Orientalism, Orientalism Today: The Demonization of Islam in the News and Popular Culture, Orientalism in Action: The Media and the Oklahoma City Bombing, Orientalism and the Palestinian Question.
Said begins with the basics by telling us that there is a lens through which the West looks at the Middle East and distorts the actual reality of the people; “It is motivated.” The lens used, Said calls Orientalism. In response to the interview questions, Said replies in a personalized manner which makes the film interesting for a lot people who have read Said but haven’t interacted directly with him. In response to a question about what triggered his interest in Orientalism, he mentions two things. One, he says, had to do with the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, when the media showed the Israelis as cowardly and not modern, while they fought like anybody else! Secondly, he says, the disparity between his experiences of what being an Arab was, and representations of that, drove him to decide to write a history.
Said then gives us concrete examples of Orientalism—of the repertoire of images, wherein the Middle East is full of sensual woman, monsters and secrets—all of which, he says, have nothing to do with the real Orient, but were simply narratives consistent with themselves. Such narratives, he emphasizes, extended to descriptions by experts and were presented as objective knowledge. According to Said, the images produced by artists and novelists of great repute like Gerard de Nerval and Edward W. Lane conveyed that the Orientals were all the same: that the Orient doesn’t develop; is outside of history, is placid, timeless, still and eternal. He says that all this is simply contradicted by the fact of history and had merely lent to the creation of an ideal other for Europe.
In explaining “Why the Middle East looks the way it does,” Said looks to the historical context and particularly that of imperialistic conquests, where ‘conquering ideologically’ had taken place. He sees the 1798 Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt as the first modern imperial invasion. This is because, says Said, “Napoleon came with not just an enormous army of soldiers, but also scientists, botanists, architects, philologists, biologists and others who were to produce some sort of scientific survey that was not for the use of the Egyptians but the rulers.”
Said then speaks of different kinds of Orientalism and says that the difference consists in the difference between the relationships with what gets called the Orient. He identifies Britain and France (European Orientalism) and the United States (American Orientalism) as involved in the two main kinds of Orientalism, direct in the case of Britain and France and indirect in the American one.
American Orientalism, according to Said, is mostly based on abstractions and is politicized by the presence of Israel for which the America is the main ally; a considerable part of the film is next devoted to this theme. Said insists that everything we read and watch is coloured politically by this Arab-Israeli conflict and America’s take on it. Said next speaks of his book, Covering Islam (the second of his three books conceived as a trilogy, the other two being Orientalism and The Question of Palestine). He tells us that the media coverage always gave a negative impression, something that had not changed years after the book had been written. He mentions the film “Jihad in America” and criticizes what he calls the dominant “irresponsible journalism”. Explicating this, he says “a video where people are seen discussing in Arabic would be understood that they were discussing the destruction of America, while if you knew the language a little bit, you would realize that it has nothing to do about America.” Said sees this as something that is coupled with the demonization of Islam—the act of seeing Islam as synonymous with terror. All of these different phenomena, Said sees as products of the commercial and political interests of America. While there is no investigative reporting, there is only repeating the line of the American government, says Said and that “as a result of all this, the human side of the Arabic world is not to be found.”
The “new American Orientalism” that this film discusses is refreshing and provides Said’s take on a variety of issues. The film shows us clips from movies, press conferences, news coverage and even cartoons to prove its point, all of which make this the film very watchable. An animation clip from Aladdin has him say, “It’s barbaric, but hey, its home,” and so no one can miss the point being made.
Said continues by saying that in movies the Arabs are always villains and fanatics and the dead Muslim bodies are huge in number. He says that the movies present the idea that Islam needs to be stamped out and that the only language Islam understands is violence. Said’s response to terrorism in this film appears balanced; he says, “there are terrorists as there are, everywhere,” and that “in not really mounting a serious critique of all this, the Arabs, according to him, have participated and allowed the misrepresentations.” The 22 Arab countries together don’t have an information policy to try to give a different picture of the Arab countries to the West, we are told.
Said recalls personal experiences, like when during the Oklahoma bombing, all media wanted to talk to him, to see if he had an insight into the bombing that was seen as of Middle Eastern origin without much basis and even discovered later to be of Christian fundamentalist origin. Said does not let us forget that “Indonesia and Saudi Arabia are both Islamic but very different and that Morocco and Algeria are very different.” He recognizes racist clichés of orientalist discourse, in The Sunday Times, London’s headline for the Diana-Dodi Fayed affair which said: “A match made in Mecca.” His examples are precise and serve his case well. He tells us these are the results of Orientalism and persist because of discourse and defines it as “a regulated system of producing knowledge within certain constraints where certain rules have to be observed. Not to use it is virtually impossible.”
Sharing his intellectual influences with us, Said tells us that Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks contains an idea that appeals to him. And that is Gramsci’s idea that history leaves in us an infinity of traces, but no inventory and no orderly guide to it. There is a task of interpretation left: to understand history in terms of others’ as well. Said says that this is his task and one where “unitary identity should be transformed to an identity that includes the other without suppressing the difference.”
Although being very crisply edited, timely and useful, with music that usefully underlines the film-text, the film doesn’t take up critiques of Orientalism. Hence it needs to be seen as an introductory film, helping students to grasp the hypothesis of Orientalism. The film doesn’t tell us why a lot of people stopped reading Said at Orientalism, seeing his other work as repetitive and uninteresting. Said’s thesis relies on certain readings of Foucault (power-knowledge thesis) and Gramsci a bit too much, and describing all of history as a quest for power has left a lot of history unexplained. Alternate understandings of Foucault like that given by the editor Arnold I. Davidson coupled with Said’s thesis could lead us to far more interesting conclusions, but they have simply remained unexplored both in this film and otherwise as well. Moreover, Said’s thesis has in actuality resulted more in conspiracy theories than anything else. In conjunction with ideas like hybridity that postcolonial scholars like Bhabha have proposed, Orientalism remains just an interesting thesis that doesn’t actually produce more questions or research problems. With scholars like Spivak deeming all theoretical knowledge as running counter to the anti-Orientalist agenda, the future of these areas of study simply looks bleak. The followers of Said waver between positions that are anti-theory and at the same seeking subaltern voices. Neither epistemology nor politics has indeed benefited from the thesis of Orientalism.
The thesis of Orientalism prompts us to say that most statements that were expressed about the ‘other’ were purposefully racist and derogatory; that the purpose here was power, power to rule and administrate the other. However a careful look at history will show that such statements have persisted in Western travelers’ accounts from the 15th century on and these travelers and visitors had no intention to rule or conquer. This has been easy to prove, at least in the case of India. In short, the situation has been one where evolving a criteria to understand current Orientalisms is not progressing at all.
The only significant line of thought in recent scholarship that is helpful in this situation is to be found in S. N. Balagangadhara’s work. “How is it a contribution to knowledge, to say that the Europeans were prejudiced against the East, without explaining why they had to necessarily be so?” asks Prof. Balu. Balagangadhara also asks that if Orientalism consisted in wrong representations, then we must be able to come up with a correct understanding of the East, to which postcolonial scholars give meek replies about the evils of essentialism and the quests for origins.
Such dead-ends and problems, however, don’t seem to be within the intentional purview of the film. In this sense, the film is somewhat adulatory of Said. But it should be very useful for beginners, students of Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Theory, Gender Studies, Cultural and Social Anthropology and related disciplines.
References:
Balagangadhara, S. N., lecture titled “Cultural Difference” at Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), Bangalore, Feb 10th 2010.
Balagangadhara, S.N and Marianne Keppens. 2009. "Reconceptualizing the Postcolonial Project: Beyond the Strictures and Structures of Orientalism." Interventions 11 (1): 50–68.
Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.
Foucault, Michel. 2004. Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974-1975. A. I. Davidson, ed. New York: Picador.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1990. The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. Sarah Harasym, ed. London: Routledge.
To cite this review, the American Anthropological Association recommends the following style:
Kannan, Sushumna
2010 Review of Edward Said: On Orientalism. Anthropology Review Database. April 30. Electronic document, http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/cgi/showme.cgi?keycode=3529, accessed May 9, 2010.
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