STUDYING OTHERS IS OPPRESSIVE

STUDYING OTHERS IS OPPRESSIVE

1. CLAIMS OF EXPERTISE OF OTHER PEOPLE ARE INHERENTLY HIERARCHICAL

Edward Said, University Professor, Columbia University, ORIENTALISM, 1978, p.32

Knowledge to Balfour means surveying a civilization from its origins to its prime to its decline-and of course, it means being able to do that. Knowledge: means rising above immediacy, beyond self, into the foreign and distant. The object of such knowledge is inherently vulnerable to scrutiny; this object is a "fact" which, if it develops, changes, or otherwise transforms itself in the way that civilizations frequently do, nevertheless is fundamentally, even ontologically stable. To have such knowledge of such a thing is to dominate it, to have authority over it. And authority here means for "us" to deny autonomy to "it"-the Oriental country-since we know it and it exists, in a sense, as we know it.

Edward Said, University Professor, Columbia University, ORIENTALISM, 1978, p.2-3

The interchange between the academic and the more or less imaginative meanings of Orientalism is a constant one, and since the late eighteenth century there has been a considerable, quite disciplined-perhaps even regulated-traffic between the two. Here I come to the third meaning of Orientalism, which is something more historically and materially defined than either of the other two. Taking the late eighteenth century as a very roughly defined starting point Orientalism. can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient--dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.

NOTIONS OF IDENTITY AND ORIENT ARE CONSTRUCTIONS

1. THERE IS NO AUTHENTIC INDIVIDUAL

Edward Said, University Professor, Columbia University, THE PEN AND THE SWORD: CONVERSATIONS WITH DAVID BARSMIAN, 1994, p.169-170

DB: The whole issue of authentic voices and who gets to speak, for example, seems to be central to this particular debate. ES: I think it 's become almost too central. The idea is that we have to have a representative from X community and Y community. I think at some point it can be useful. It was certainly useful to me. At a certain moment there was a felt need for an authentic Palestinian or an authentic Arab to say things, and then one could say it. But I think one has to always go beyond that, not simply accept the role but constantly challenge the format, challenge the setting, challenge the context, to expand it, to the larger issues that lurk behind these. It 's not just a question of simple representation and an authentic voice. Like having a tenor, a soprano, an alto and a bass in a chorus. But a much larger issue which has to do with social change. That 's what 's lacking at the present moment.

Edward Said, University Professor, Columbia University, ORIENTALISM, 1978, p.210-211

What we must reckon with is a long and slow process of appropriation by which Europe, or the European awareness of the Orient, transformed itself from being textual and contemplative into being administrative, economic, and even military. The fundamental change was a spatial and geographical one, or rather it was a change in the quality of geographical and spatial apprehension so far as the Orient was concerned. The centuries-old designation of geographical space to the east of Europe as "Oriental" was partly political, partly doctrinal, and partly imaginative; it implied no necessary connection between actual experience of the orient an knowledge of what is Oriental, and certainly Dante and d 'Herbelot made no claims about their oriental ideas except that they were corroborated by a long learned (and not existential) tradition.
3. ASSERTING KNOWLEDGE OF A GROUP CREATES THAT GROUP

Edward Said, University Professor, Columbia University, ORIENTALISM, 1978, p.2-3

The Oriental is irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, "different"; thus the European is rational, virtuous, mature, "normal." But the way of enlivening the relationship was everywhere to stress the fact that the Oriental lived in a different but thoroughly organized world of his own, a world with its own national, cultural, and epistemological boundaries and principles of internal coherence. Yet what gave the Oriental's world its intelligibility and identity was not the result of his own efforts but rather the whole complex series of knowledgeable manipulations by which the Orient was identified by the West. Thus the two features of cultural relationship I have been discussing come together. Knowledge of the Orient, because generated out of strength, in a sense creates the Orient, the Oriental, and his world. In Cromer's and Balfour's language the Oriental is depicted as something one judges (as in a court of law), something one studies and depicts (as in a curriculum), something one disciplines (as in a school or prison), something one illustrates (as in a zoological manual). The point is that in each of these cases the Oriental is contained and represented by dominating frameworks.
4. THERE IS NO REALITY BEHIND THE GEOGRAPHIC DISTINCTION EAST VERSUS WEST

Edward Said, University Professor, Columbia University, ORIENTALISM, 1978, p.210-211

It is not the thesis of this book to suggest that there is such a thing as a real or true Orient (Islam, Arab, or whatever); nor is it to make an assertion about the necessary privilege of an "insider" perspective over an "outsider" one, to use Robert K. Merton 's useful distinction. On the contrary, I have been arguing that "the Orient" is itself a constituted entity, and that the notion that there are geographical spaces with indigenous, radically "different" inhabitants who can be defined on the basis of some religion, culture, or racial essence proper to that geographical space is equally a highly debatable idea. I certainly do not believe the limited proposition that only a black can write about blacks, a Muslim about Muslims, and so forth.