Edward Said
The West invented an image of the Orient as exotic and backward, and that image served to justify ruling over it.
Placement
Orientalism: how the West constructed “the Orient” as its counter-image.
Key ideas
- Orientalism
- Contrapuntal reading
Influence
Influenced by 7
Giambattista Vico
influenced by
Said took from Vico, discussed in Beginnings (1975), the principle that humans know what they have made, treating the Orient as a human construction (Orientalism, 1978). E. W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975); Orientalism (1978), introduction; SEP “Giambattista Vico”
Evidence: AI draft
Giambattista Vico › 1668–1744
Antonio Gramsci
influenced by
Said explained Orientalism’s durability with Gramsci’s hegemony and took from the Prison Notebooks the task of an ‘inventory’ of history’s traces in oneself (Orientalism, 1978). E. W. Said, Orientalism (1978), introduction; A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere (1929–35); SEP “Antonio Gramsci”
Evidence: AI draft
Antonio Gramsci › 1891–1937
Aimé Césaire
influenced by
In Culture and Imperialism (1993, ch. 3) Said read Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land and his rewriting of The Tempest (1969) as works of a culture of resistance in which the colonised reclaim their own history. E. W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993), ch. 3 “Resistance and Opposition”
Evidence: AI draft
Aimé Césaire › 1913–2008
Raymond Williams
influenced by
Said built on Williams’s The Country and the City (1973) and his structures of feeling, while noting that Williams said little about empire (Culture and Imperialism, 1993). E. W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993); The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983); R. Williams, The Country and the City (1973)
Evidence: AI draft
Raymond Williams › 1921–1988
Frantz Fanon
influenced by
Said read Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961) as a theory of liberation that also warns against national elites repeating colonial rule (Culture and Imperialism, 1993). E. W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993); F. Fanon, Les damnés de la terre (1961); SEP “Frantz Fanon”
Evidence: AI draft
Frantz Fanon › 1925–1961
Michel Foucault
influenced by ✓
Said used Foucault’s notion of discourse to describe Orientalism as knowledge bound up with colonial power, while giving more weight than Foucault to individual authors (Orientalism, 1978). E. W. Said, Orientalism (1978), introduction; M. Foucault, L’archéologie du savoir (1969); SEP “Michel Foucault”
Evidence: also in Wikidata · Wikidata
Michel Foucault › 1926–1984
Syed Hussein Alatas
influenced by
In Culture and Imperialism (1993) Said cited Alatas’s The Myth of the Lazy Native (1977) as scholarship exposing the colonial image of the native as ideology. E. W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993); S. H. Alatas, The Myth of the Lazy Native (1977)
Evidence: AI draft
Syed Hussein Alatas › 1928–2007
Influenced 1
Linda Tuhiwai Smith
influenced
Tuhiwai Smith used Said’s Orientalism to describe the ‘positional superiority’ of Western knowledge and the imperial archive through which research classified others (Decolonizing Methodologies, 1999). L. Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies (1999); E. Said, Orientalism (1978)
Evidence: AI draft
Linda Tuhiwai Smith › b. 1950
Criticism
Criticized by 1
Sadiq Jalal al-Azm
criticised by
Al-Azm objected that Said, by tracing Orientalism back to Homer and Aeschylus, made it an unchanging essence of the West, and that those who answered it with an unchanging Islamic or Arab essence practised Orientalism in reverse. S. J. al-Azm, “Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse”, Khamsin 8 (1981)
Evidence: AI draft
Sadiq Jalal al-Azm › 1934–2016
Works
- 1978Orientalism
Knowledge of the Orient as an instrument of Western power.
Position
In Orientalism Said examined how European scholarship, literature and politics since the eighteenth century created an image of “the Orient” as exotic, irrational, unchanging and in need of guidance – the counter-image against which the West defined itself as rational and progressive. Drawing on Foucault’s analysis of discourse and power and on Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, he argued that this knowledge was not innocent but bound up with colonial domination. In Culture and Imperialism he extended the analysis to the great novels of the nineteenth century and proposed a “contrapuntal” reading that brings out the colonial world hidden in them. Said became one of the founders of postcolonial studies, and his work still provokes debate.
Life & context
Said was born in Jerusalem in 1935 into a Palestinian Christian family and grew up partly in Cairo. He studied at Princeton and Harvard and taught English and comparative literature at Columbia University in New York from 1963 until his death. A prominent advocate of Palestinian rights, he co-founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra with Daniel Barenboim. He died in 2003.
Further main works
- The Question of Palestine (1979)
- Culture and Imperialism (1993)
- Out of Place (1999)
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