ES3301: ‘Race’, Education & ‘the Other’
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Last updated 09.02.10.
““[T]he Orient” is itself a constituted entity, and …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… a highly debatable idea.” (Emphases added) (Said, 1978, p.322)
Introduction
Some of what follows provides a historical backdrop to the discussion of Edward Said and the construction of ‘the Other’ which will constitute the main part of this first lecture.
Solomos and Back (1996) identify two key themes in the study of the rise of ideas about ‘race’ in European society
1. Location of modern theories of ‘race’ within the intellectual and social transformation associated with the Enlightenment (late C18th and C19th) – emphasis upon categorisation of humankind and attribution of cultural and social significance to racial boundaries;
2. Impact of European exploration, expansion, slavery, colonisation and imperial domination on ideas about ‘race’:
This is indicative of the generally accepted view that the Enlightenment is inextricably intertwined with racial ideologies. The following two quotations are also examples of this theoretical perspective.
‘Physical differences between peoples have been observed throughout human history; all over the world people have developed words for delineating them. "Race" is a concept rooted in a particular culture and a particular period of history which brings with it suggestions about how these differences are to be explained.’
(Banton, 1991; p. 39)
‘[R]ace emerged with and has served to define modernity by insinuating itself in various fashions into modernity’s prevailing conceptions of moral personhood and subjectivity […] By working itself into the threads of liberalism’s cloth just as that cloth was being woven, race and the various exclusions it licensed became naturalised in the Eurocentric visions of itself and its self-defined others, in its sense of reason and rational direction.’
(Goldberg, 1993; p. 10)
The suggestion of these two perspectives is that the Enlightenment ‘invented’ race and racism. However, the situation is much more complicated than that because many of the issues associated with modern ideas about ‘race’ pre-existed the Enlightenment (e.g. evidence from Egypt, Greece and Rome about ideas regarding differences on the basis of skin colour and phenotypical features). Said infers that some of these categorisations of ‘the other’ derive from prehistoric distinctions between tribal groups, “To a certain extent modern and primitive societies seem thus to derive a sense of their identities negatively… Yet often the sense in which someone feels himself to be not-foreign is based on a very unrigorous idea of what is “out there”, beyond one’s own territory. All kinds of suppositions, associations, and fictions appear to crowd the unfamiliar space outside one’s own.” (Said, 1978, p.53) But there is general agreement among ‘race’ theorists that it was only in the late C18th/early C19th that the term ‘race’ came to refer to discrete categories of people defined according to their physical and mental characteristics. In short, it was during the Enlightenment that our contemporary ideas about ‘race’ were consolidated. So too, Edward Said argues, were our ideas about ‘the Orient’. Ideas, so to speak became policy, concepts became hard and fast realities and ‘races’ were realised. By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, “because the Oriental-European relationship was determined by an unstoppable European expansion in search of markets, resources and colonies, […] Orientalism had completed its self-metamorphosis from a scholarly discourse to an imperial institution.” (Said, 1978. p.95) In this respect Orientalism and racism are integrally interrelated, and bound up with imperialism and foreign policy until the present day.
1. Scientific discourses about ‘race’
The Enlightenment was characterised by very rapid increases and developments in rational thought and scientific and (pseudo-scientific) knowledge, and
‘The attempt to classify human races according to physical and mental attributes was to become a key concept in the social and political debates of the nineteenth century. In this sense ideologies of race are as much a product of modernity as are socialism and liberalism.’
(Solomos and Back, 1996; p. 36)
Solomos and Back argue that this move towards racial categorisation was influenced and encouraged by a growing interest in the identification, measurement, and explanation of differing features in the natural world
‘It was largely on the basis of these ideas that during the early nineteenth century a concept of ‘race’ had emerged which went something like this: (i) the physical appearance and behaviour of individuals was an expression of a discrete biological type which was permanent; (ii) cultural variation was determined by differences in biological type; (iii) biological variation was the origin of conflict both between individuals and nations; and (iv) ‘races’ were differentially endowed such that some were inherently superior to others.’
(Solomos and Back, 1996; pp. 42-3)
This worldview justified and perpetuated the notion that there was a hierarchy of life on earth, which is characterised in the notion of the Great Chain of Being, which Solomos and Back describe in the following way:
‘Each ‘race’ represented a rung in the vertical construction with black people somewhere near the bottom and whites somewhere near the top. This intellectual structure satisfied a deep desire for order in society as well as in nature. Just as various forms of creation had their places in the Chain of Being, so society was properly ordered according to rank and status.’
(Solomos and Back, 1996; p. 43)
This perception was generated in part by a use of Darwin’s thesis about the survival of the fittest and natural selection (Origin of the Species, 1859) and by his discussion of the rise from savagery (and towards British civility and Anglicanism) (Descent of Man, 1871). Whilst ‘race’ was made the basis of scientific subject matter in Darwinian anthropology and phrenology, it also found a firm hold in comparative linguistics and philology: “Language and race seemed inextricably tied… “Aryans” were confined to Europe and the ancient Orient… the Aryan myth dominated historical and cultural anthropology at the expense of the “lesser” peoples.” (Said, 1978, p.99)
“It was assumed that if languages were as distinct from each other as the linguists said they were, then too the language users – their minds, cultures, potentials, and even their bodies – were different in similar ways. And these distinctions had the force of ontological, empirical truth behind them, together with the convincing demonstration of such truth in studies of origins, development, character and destiny.” (Said, 1978, p.233)
Forms of racial thinking developed hand in hand with anthropocentrism, and in alliance with Eurocentrism, resulting in the “hegemony of possessing minorities”. A biologically racist basis of all nineteenth century thought was thus established, whether pro-imperialist or anti-imperialist, “all carried forward the binary typology of advanced and backward (or subject) races”. (Said, 1978, pp 206-7) ‘Orientals’ were, in the nineteenth century, viewed within a framework constructed out of biological determinism: “The Oriental was linked thus to elements in Western society (delinquents, the insane, women, the poor) having in common an identity best described as lamentably alien.” (Said, 1978, p.207) By the nineteenth century, the Orient was underlain by a layer of shared doctrine, fashioned from the experience of Europeans, regarding Oriental character, Oriental despotism, Oriental sensuality, etc. Orientalism was thus a system of scientific ‘truths’. ‘Truth’, of course, delimits all other modes of discourse: “It is therefore correct that every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.” (Said, 1978, pp.203) Said claims that, in this, Orientalism gave the people of advanced societies exactly the same as other human sciences – nothing but “imperialism racism, and ethnocentrism for dealing with “other” cultures.” (Said, 1978, p.204)
In Orientalist discourse in the nineteenth century,
“the attribute of being Oriental overrode any countervailing instance. An Oriental man was first an Oriental and only second a man. Such radical [racial] typing was naturally reinforced by sciences (or discourses, as I prefer to call them) that took a backward and downward direction towards the species category, which was supposed also to be an ontogenetic explanation for every member of the species.” (Said, 1978, p.231)
Scientifically valid distinctions based on language-types acquired essentialist anthropological and biological forms (races), supported by selected cultural evidence. For instance, “Semitic” became “a transtemporal, transindividual category, purporting to predict every discrete act of “Semitic” behaviour on the basis of some pre-existing “Semitic” essence, and aiming as well to interpret all aspects of human life and activity in terms of some common “Semitic” element.” (Said, 1978, p.231) Here, then, Said fills out Solomos and Back’s description to offer an account of the ‘Orientalist’ ontogenesis of biological racial categories.
The appeal of biology to offer an account of races lay in its empiricism: races were considered true, logical and inevitable “protoforms” derived from linguistic types:
“Thus in trying to formulate a prototypical and primitive linguistic type (as well as a cultural, psychological and historical one), there was also an “attempt to define a primary human potential,” out of which completely scientific instances of behaviour uniformly derived.”(Said, 1978, p.232)
If theses about racial characteristics were merely sides in an academic debate, they might be dismissed. However, these categories played an important part in shaping attitudes and policies which impacted on colonised peoples in ways which are still felt today.
“Race theory, ideas about primitive origins and… the progress of civilization, the destiny of the White (or Aryan) races, the need for colonial territories – all these were elements in the peculiar amalgam of science, politics, and culture whose drift, almost without exception, was always to raise Europe or a European race to dominion over non-European portions of mankind.” (Said, 1978, p.232)
Said emphasizes these scientific bases to racism and Orientalism because, he argues, the legacy of this thinking persists (see ‘Orientalism Now’ below). For instance, Said states: “Orientals were rarely seen or looked at; they were seen through, analyzed not as citizens, or even people, but as problems to be solved or confined or – as the colonial powers openly coveted their territory – taken over.” (Said, 1978, p.207) As we will see later, this racialised creation of ‘the Arab problem’ or ‘the Muslim problem’ provides parallels with the ways in which British and US foreign policy thinking is enacted even today, in, for instance, Palestine, Iran and Iraq.
2. Slavery, imperialism and colonisation
‘Race’ theorists are agreed that there is a clear link between capitalist expansion (as characterised by slavery, imperialism and colonisation) and the emergence/consolidation of racist ideologies, but have differing interpretations of the reasons for this link. In short, this is a ‘chicken and egg’ debate: did racism precede (and therefore serve as a justification and impetus for) slavery, imperialism and colonialism or is it a post-rationalisation of the inequalities which were embedded in these practices?
Said’s version of events and that of Solomos and Back outlined above provide one (or two) of many possible variations on this theme. The main issue for this module is that the European expansion of the 18th and 19th centuries is clearly linked with a proliferation of ideas about ‘race’ which Said, and other theorists we will consider, argue still inform British ideas about racial and cultural differences, and are embedded in educational policy and practice. It’s worth rehearsing some definitions of the basic terms here before we discuss the relevant issues: What do each of these mean to you?
· Slavery
· Colonisation
· Imperialism
It is generally agreed that post-Enlightenment, there was a developing social and political environment in Europe where the domination of Africans and Asians by Europeans and Americans was believed by the majority to be not simply a result of their ownership of property and capacity to buy labour power, but also a reflection of and justification of, their presumed ‘natural’ superiority by virtue of being white. Some ‘race’ theorists argue that this worldview was reliant upon, and generated by, a particular construction of ‘the Other’ when dealing with the members of colonised countries.
3. Constructions of ‘the Other’
The combination of Enlightenment philosophy, philology and comparative linguistics, the growth in scientific reasoning, and European expansion is argued by race theorists (although again, with slightly differing interpretations) to be closely associated with the development of notions of ‘the Other’. In some cases, the theorists are stating that ‘the Other’ is a theme which runs through all these elements, and others argue that ‘the Other’ is something that is constructed by combining these elements: it is the sum of their parts.
Said’s concept of Orientalism is often presented as the classic version of how ‘the Other’ is constructed in popular ideas about ‘race’. Orientalism is defined as “a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the Orient” and (most of the time) “the Occident”.”(Said, 1978, p.2) This, then, has to do with the relations between Europe and that area termed ‘the Orient’, historically defined for a series of complex reasons largely as India and ‘the Bible lands’.
“The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other.” (Said, 1978, p.1)
Later we will examine the ways in which contemporary constructions of ‘racialised’ categories have derived in part from the American experience of Orientalizing its ‘others’. At the time Orientalism was first written, Said identified American understanding of the Orient as considerably less dense and nuanced than European understandings. Do you think this might still be true? If so, why do you imagine this is the case?
‘The construction of identity – for identity, whether of Orient or Occident, France or Britain, while obviously a repository of distinct collective experiences, is finally a construction – involves establishing opposites and "others" whose actuality is always subject to the continuous interpretation and re-interpretation of their differences from "us". Each age and society re-creates its "others". Far from a static thing then, identity of self or of "other" is a much worked-over historical, social, intellectual, and political process that takes place as a contest involving individuals and institutions in all societies.’
(Said, 1978; p. 332)
What Said is arguing here is that there is no stable human essence and Western ideas about the Orient and Orientals (i.e. non-Westerners) have been constructed through a combination of literary, historical and scholarly accounts which serve the purpose of allowing the West to assert control over the Orient. The Orient, like the West has no “ontological stability”, each is made of human effort and affirmation, and identification of the Other. These “supreme fictions” have the same status we would ascribe to ‘race’, and like ‘race’ “lend themselves easily to manipulation and the organisation of collective passion”. In our time this translates into the “mobilisation of fear, hatred, disgust and resurgent self-pride and arrogance – much of it having to do with Islam and the Arabs on one side, “we” Westerners on the other” (Said, 2003c, p.xii)
The important point to make here is Said’s emphasis upon the ‘taken for grantedness’ of the superiority of Western cultural values and behaviours, which he explains through Gramsci’s concept of hegemony (Said, 1978, p.7). This, briefly, is concerned with the ways in which controversial views/practices in plural societies are, for the most part, not contested. To understand this argument, we need to identify Gramsci’s distinction between political and civil society. He states that political society is made up of state institutions such as the army, police and civil service whose purpose is to maintain order, and in times of conflict, to assert order. In contrast, civil society is made up of voluntary affiliations such as families, cultural groups, schools and unions, which, tend to have less legitimate authority to dominate their members. Significantly, Gramsci identifies civil society as the site where a society’s culture operates, and he says that it is precisely because of its voluntary, consensual nature that civil society allows hegemony to occur. He argues that if certain controversial cultural forms were to be asserted on a population by its political institutions this would be immediately recognised as an imposition; however, the same cultural forms can be disseminated through a society’s civil structures and be perceived as uncontroversial. Said suggests that the liberal consensus that “true” knowledge is unpolitical obscures the political circumstances in which knowledge is obtained: “[F]or a European or American studying the Orient there can be no disclaiming the main circumstances of his actuality: that he comes up against the Orient as European or American first, and as an individual second.” (Said, 1978, p.11) Whilst we might want to acknowledge that the student of the Orient can never entirely deny their position, would we thereby want to allow that position determining power?
The European cultural hegemony of Orientalism reiterates European superiority over the East. Europeans’ racial ideas came out of the same impulse, and derive from a long history of both material dominance and constructed discursive superiority.
In relation to the West’s perceptions and treatments of the non-Western world, Said is not arguing that there was any consciously organised or direct manipulation of the West’s understanding of the non-Western world, but that the factors he identifies in the quotation above have fortuitously combined to create a particular worldview which advantages the West. Thus, his reference to the ‘systematic discipline’ in the following quotation, should not be interpreted as evidence of his belief in a consciously planned and organised campaign of misrepresentation and discrimination, but instead as suggestive of the ways in which all these disparate and uncontrolled factors have combined and inter-connected so effectively for the benefits of the West, in other words, that a variety of seemingly unconnected perspectives have managed to produce a coherent means of understanding ‘the Other’. The senses in which Said is using both the terms ‘discourse’ and ‘discipline’ in this sentence he acknowledges derive from Foucault’s “Discipline and Punish”. Said contends that
‘ without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage – and even produce – the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period.’
(Said, 1978; p.3)
This coherence enables the West’s beliefs about itself and its ‘others’ to be reproduced in the West’s dealings with its ‘others’, which in turn serves to legitimise the original beliefs. Said argues that this continual cycle of multi-faceted construction, enaction and legitimisation of Orientalism is the source of the concept’s durability.
‘What we must try to grasp is the sheer knitted-together strength of Orientalist discourse, its very close ties to the enabling socio-economic and political institutions, and its redoubtable durability. […] Orientalism, therefore, is not an airy European fantasy about the Orient, but a created body of theory and practice in which, for many generations, there has been considerable material investment. Continued investment made Orientalism, as a system of knowledge about the Orient, an accepted grid for filtering through the Orient into Western consciousness, just as the same investment multiplied – indeed, made truly productive – the statements proliferating out from Orientalism into the general culture.’
(Said, 1978; p. 6)
In a very long but valuable sentence on page 12 of Orientalism Said defines what ‘Orientalism’ is and is not in relation to power and politics. It is, in part, “a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world; it is, above all a discourse that is, by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with power in the raw, but is rather produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power”. He goes on to mention political, intellectual and cultural power.
In what follows we will examine this dense and complex interplay of power and politics which shapes and informs the ‘Orientalisation’ of ‘the Other’.
Orientalism is a “dynamic exchange between individual authors and the large political concerns shaped by the three great empires – British, French, American – in whose intellectual territory the writing was produced.” (Said, 1978, pp.14-15) Arabs and Islam, for almost a thousand years “stood for” the Orient in the Anglo-French-American experience. The principal racialised ‘other’ with which we concern ourselves in Said’s theorisation, then, is ‘the Arab’. Next week and in coming weeks we will turn to examine how this leads those in Europe and America to a special and particular racialised and Orientalized understanding of Islam. For the moment, it is worth remembering that all racialised discourse is also political discourse, the product of power politics:
“[I]t hardly needs saying that because the Middle East is now so identified with Great Power politics , oil economics, and the simple-minded dichotomy of freedom-loving, democratic Israel and evil, totalitarian, and terroristic Arabs, the chances of anything like a clear view of what one talks about in talking about the near East are depressingly small….The web of racism, cultural stereotypes, political imperialism, dehumanizing ideology holding in the Arab or the Muslim is very strong indeed”. (Said, 1978, p.27)
For Said the peculiar power and authority of Orientalization does not reside in what lies hidden within a text, but in its surface: Orientalism relies on exteriority, an ability to reveal the Orient and render its mysteries plain for the West. The text is meant to indicate that the Orientalist is outside of the Orient, as a moral and existential fact. The Orient is transformed from a very distant otherness into some figures which are more or less familiar. We find in this explanation the core of the authority of many, less subtly racialising discourses – the BNP leaflet, the man in the pub – whose certain knowledge reveals universal characteristics of his subject – ‘the Oriental’, ‘those blacks’, ‘the pakis’. British imperial sovereignty and British global supremacy had to do with power and knowledge, the ability, the power to survey and know a civilisation from beginning to end. The Foucauldian formulation Said uses is of Power-Knowledge:
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 civilisations 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 to have authority 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. (Said, 1978, p.32)
There has never been, claims Said, anything so innocent as a single “idea of the Orient” in the West, such a construction would reduce the West to a single monolithic mode of thinking in the way that Orientalist theory claims is true of the East. Hence Said differs from those who would study the “history of ideas” – his approach is “anthropological” in that Said takes all texts to be “worldly and circumstantial” (Said, 1978, p.23), all ideas as material products of their political and cultural climates. An example of this is the ‘knowledge’ about the Oriental ‘race’ propounded by Lord Cromer in 1908. If you would like to read an account of official racism at the height of British Imperial power, take a look at pp.38-9 of Orientalism. Here we see how the experience of British colonial government of Egypt both justified and was justified by the understanding that the Orientals or Arabs are unable to govern themselves, they are, merely human material to be governed,
“gullible, “devoid of energy and initiative,” much given to “fulsome flattery,” intrigue, cunning and unkindness to animals; Orientals cannot walk on either a road or a pavement (their disordered minds fail to understand what the clever European grasps immediately, that roads and pavements are made for walking); Orientals are inveterate liars, they are “lethargic and suspicious,” and in everything oppose the clarity, directness and nobility of the Anglo-Saxon race.” (Said, 1978, pp.38-9)
Orientalism as an explanation for the power of racism is always fundamentally about real political relations. “Orientalism was ultimately a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, “us”) and the strange (the Orient, the East, “them”). This vision in a sense created and then served the two worlds it conceived.” (Said, 1978, pp.43-4) Orientalism sets up ‘racial’ and other binaries which serve to reinforce the racialised ‘otherness’ of ‘the Other’. These oppositions are always premised on the relative strength of the West and weakness of the East. “The Oriental is irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, “different”; thus the European is rational, virtuous, mature, “normal”.” (Said, 1978, p.40) Whilst the Oriental lived in a world of his own, what gave this world intelligibility and identity was not his own efforts but the knowledgeable manipulations by which the Orient was managed by the West. “Knowledge of the Orient, because generated out of strength, in a sense creates the Orient, the Oriental and his world.” (Emphases added)(Said, 1978, p.40)
“[T]he 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.”
(Said, 1978, p.40)
Clearly, Said is not neutral with regard to the racist and other consequences of Orientalism. As an intellectual, his aim is to challenge and undermine such positions. His work represents a sustained critique of power relations between West and East, the USA and the Muslim countries, Israel and Palestine, and the racialising and racist consequences of these relations from the eighteenth century right up to the present day. He questions:
“Can one divide human reality, as indeed human reality seems to be genuinely divided, into clearly different… races, and survive the consequences humanly. By surviving the consequences humanly, I mean to ask whether there is any way of avoiding the hostility expressed by the division, say, of men into “us” (Westerners) and “they” (Orientals). For such divisions are generalities whose use historically and actually has been to press the importance of the distinction between some men and some other men, usually towards not especially admirable ends… Orientalism as a form of thought for dealing with the foreign has typically shown the altogether regrettable tendency of any knowledge based on such hard-and-fast distinctions as “East” and “West”: to channel thought into a West or an East compartment.” (Said, 1978, p.45)
An important aspect of all discourses which create ‘the Other’ is the tendency to make the variable fixed and the many singular. “On the level of the thematic, [the Orientalists] adopt an essentialist conception of the countries, nations and peoples of the Orient under study, a conception which expresses itself through a characterized ethnist typology… and will soon proceed with it toward racism.” (Abdel-Malek, in Said, 1978, p.97) The textual approach to understanding the peoples of the Orient, combined with the imperial project to order, control and subject its peoples results in an identification and fixing of types, an “ethnist typology”. Abdel-Malek offers an excellent description of the process of fixing the ethnic/‘racial’ type as a product of Orientalist thinking: the ahistorical essentialist definition of a people
“transfixes the being, the “object” of study, within its inalienable and non-evolutive specificity, instead of defining it as all other beings, states, nations, peoples, and cultures – as a product, a result of the vection of forces operating in the field of historical evolution. Thus one ends with a typology – based on a real specificity, but detached from history, and consequently conceived as being intangible, essential – which makes of the studied object another being with regard to whom the studying subject is transcendent; we will have a homo Sinicus, a homo Arabicus (and why not a homo Ægypticus, etc.), a homo Africanus, the man – the “normal man,” it is understood – being the European man of the historical period, that is, since Greek antiquity.” (Abdel-Malek, in Said, 1978, p.97).
The fixing of categories allows a discursive consistency, one that has historical, material and institutional presence and authority. Consistency exists in the opportunities available for making statements in a culture, statements which operate
“as representations usually do, for a purpose, according to a tendency, in a specific historical, intellectual, and even economic setting…[T]he Orientalist provides his own society with representations of the Orient (a) that bear his distinctive imprint, (b) that illustrate his conception of what the Orient can or ought to be, (c) that consciously contest someone else’s view of the Orient, (d) that provide Orientalist discourse with what, at that moment it seems in need of, and (e) that respond to certain cultural, professional, national, political, and economic requirements of the epoch.” (Said, 1978, p.273)
4. Orientalism Now
The Orient is, for the West, a complex system of representations, and its peoples – Arabs, Muslims – are known as products of these representations. The representations form a consensus where certain types of statement, certain knowledges seem correct. For Said (1978, p.206), Orientalism operates at different levels:
· Latent Orientalism: an unconscious and untouchable certainty, positivity; this level remains stable, unanimous, it is a presumption that the Orient requires Western attention, reconstruction & even redemption;
· Manifest Orientalism: the specific stated views about Oriental society, languages, literature, history, etc. Changes in knowledge occur at this level.
Contemporary manifestations of Orientalism include those forms of knowledge which have come to be known as Islamophobia – Said calls them “Islamic Orientalism” (Said, 1978, p.260) – and those which take the form of anti-Arab racism, and racism directed at peoples from across parts of the Muslim world associated in the popular imagination with representations of terror, with Somalis, Saudis, Afghanis, Iraqis and Iranians, Pakistanis, and with Palestinians, among others. In the coming weeks we will examine some of these contemporary forms of Orientalism in their construction of the ‘races’ of the Muslim world. Said has always been interested not only in the historical origins of Orientalism, but in its contemporary manifestations. In 1978 he wrote:
“[C]ontemporary Orientalist attitudes flood the press and the popular mind. Arabs, for example, are thought of as camel-riding, terroristic, hook-nosed, venal lechers whose undeserved wealth is an affront to real civilization. Always there lurks the assumption that though the western consumer belongs to a numerical minority, he is entitled either to own or to expend (or both) the majority of the world resources. Why? Because he, unlike the Oriental, is a true human being. No better instance exists today of what Anwar Abdel Malek calls “the hegemonism of possessing minorities” and anthropocentrism allied with Europocentrism.”
(Said, 1978, p.108)
Said traces contemporary forms of Orientalism in part to the development of the idea of “types” – Protestant, Oriental, Islamic, Arab – developed by early twentieth century sociology. Max Weber influenced the Orientalist field in that he appeared to lend credence to the belief in ontological differences between Eastern and Western mentalities: in relation to the protestant work ethic and the development of capitalism in the West, “his notions of type were simply an “outside” confirmation of many of the canonical theses held by Orientalists, whose economic ideas never extended beyond asserting the Oriental’s fundamental incapacity for trade, commerce, and economic rationality.” (Said, 1978, p.259)
Even more important in the formation of contemporary forms of Orientalism has been the shift in power in the Middle East from the old Empires of France and Britain to the new neo-Colonial power, The United States. Said presents the relationship between the USA and the Middle East as constitutive of ‘races’ as understood in a contemporary context. Again, it is power politics which inform how many in the West understand the characteristics of representational ‘types’. Since the Arab-Israeli wars, the Arab Muslim has become a character in American popular culture. As the American imperium has displaced French and British power, it has needed to pay more attention to “the Arab”. After the Six Day War of 1967, the Arab became, first a motto of defeat. “From a faintly outlined stereotype as a camel-riding nomad to an accepted caricature as the embodiment of incompetence and easy defeat: that was all the scope given the Arab.” (Said, 1978, p.285) However, after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, the Arab became something more menacing. Said dissects the cultural construction of a ‘racial’ type through representations in popular media.
“Cartoons depicting an Arab sheik standing behind a gasoline pump turned up consistently. These Arabs however, were clearly “Semitic”: their sharp hooked noses, the evil moustachioed leer on their faces, were obvious reminders (to a largely non-Semitic population) that “Semites” were at the bottom of all “our” troubles, which in this case was principally a gasoline shortage. The transference of a popular anti-Semitic animus from a Jewish to an Arab target was made smoothly, since the figure was essentially the same.” (Said, 1978, p.285-6)
The Arab in cinema too is bloodthirsty and degenerate – capable, but devious, sadistic, treacherous. Said presciently characterises the developing category of Arab-Islamist-Jihadist as a racialised category in contemporary media. “Lurking behind all of these images is the menace of jihad. Consequence: a fear that the Muslims (or the Arabs) will take over the world.” (Said, 1978, pp.286-7)
The American contribution to Orientalism has been to further blunt its representations. The way America approached the Orient was very different from Europe – it did not have a history of engagement, there was no deeply invested tradition of Oriental study, the US lacked knowledge of the Orient based in philological study. Importantly, there was no tradition of imaginative investment in the Orient, perhaps because the western American frontier was the one that counted. Thus the racialised characterisations which have emerged from American-dominated media have tended to be simpler and shallower; knowledge of the ‘race’ of Arabs or Muslims has been boiled down to ‘essentials’.
Said claims that American Orientalism avoids literature as this might disturb the facts generated by the social science model. The American awareness of the Orient keeps its peoples “conceptually emasculated, reduced to “attitudes,” “trends,” statistics: in short, dehumanized.” (Said, 1978, p.291) In US scholarship and society, Said claims, representation is made of a single Islam, signifying a society, a religion, a prototype, and an actuality. In American Orientalism “unlike normal (“our”) societies, Islam and Middle Eastern societies are totally “political,” an adjective meant to reproach Islam for not being “liberal,” for not being able to separate (as “we” do) politics from culture. The result is an invidiously ideological portrait of “us” and “them”.” (Said, 1978, p.299) The characteristics of the ‘races’ of Arabs, Iraqis, Muslims become inseparable from the socio-political context represented, and religion, politics and people become one. The Arabists and Islamologists (the new Orientalists) still function unrevised, “For them there are still such things as an Islamic society, an Arab mind, an Oriental psyche.” (Said, 1978, p.301)
Edward Said died in 2003, but in the last few years of his life, he wrote prolifically on the international situation. What follows should perhaps be seen as a counterpoint to the current Chilcot Enquiry into the Iraq war. Even as the first salvos were fired, Said attempted to offer explanations and a context which would make sense of the conflict, not in terms of specific policies or actors but in terms of the longstanding conditions which allowed for the possibility of Bush and Blair winning widespread assent in the USA and UK for the invasion of Iraq. Said argued that after the attacks of September 11th 2001, the comments of American leaders reached a new level of intense and inane abstraction. Bush and others began with metaphysical abstractions such as ‘evil’ and proceeded, Said argues, to ungrounded polemic on the nature of Oriental peoples. Wilful abstraction, and ignorance of multiple and varied realities are not only contributory to new forms of racism, they constitute the very ‘racial’ categories with which the populations of societies operate. Said responded with fury to the characterisation of a potential Palestinian state as a “Terrorist State” by Republican House majority leader Tom Delay. His strongly worded 2003 article outlines the misuse and abuse of terms such as ‘terrorist’ to characterize an entire people, and to restate the imperial right of the US to decide Arab people’s fate on their behalf:
“One of the basic themes of all Orientalist discourse since the mid-19th century is that the Arabic language and the Arabs are afflicted with both a mentality and a language that has no use for reality. Many Arabs have come to believe this racist drivel, as if whole national languages like Arabic, Chinese, or English directly represent the minds of their users. This notion is part of the same ideological arsenal used in the 19th century to justify colonial oppression: "Negroes" can't speak properly therefore, according to Thomas Carlyle, they must remain enslaved; "the Chinese" language is complicated and therefore, according to Ernest Renan, the Chinese man or woman is devious and should be kept down; and so on and so forth. No one takes such ideas seriously today except when Arabs, Arabic and Arabists are concerned.” (Said, 2003a, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/652/op1.htm)
A very concrete result of such racist thinking in relation to Iraqis is American “sham pragmatism” which contrasts with the lesser peoples whose delusions and faulty ideas about their country need not to be trusted. “The terrible mistakes made by Wolfowitz and Leith came down to their arrogant substitution of abstract and finally ignorant language for a far more complex and recalcitrant reality.” (Said, 2003a, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/652/op1.htm) The potent mix of imperialism and racism, informed by Orientalist knowledge and assumptions, thus enables such events as the invasion of Iraq: “Without a well organised sense that these people over there were not like “us” and didn’t appreciate “our” values – the very core of Orientalist dogma […] – there would have been no war.” (Said, 2003c, p.xv)
“[W]e are superior and reserve the right to teach the natives a lesson anywhere in the world where we perceive them to be nasty and backward. And why do we have that right? Because those woolly-haired natives whom we know from having ruled our empire for 500 years and now want America to follow, have failed: they fail to understand our superior civilisation, they are addicted to superstition and fanaticism, they are unregenerate tyrants who deserve punishment and we, by God, are the ones to do the job, in the name of progress and civilisation.” (Emphasis added) (Said, 2003a, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/652/op1.htm)
The complex reality of Iraq, and the Middle East more generally is rendered comprehensible by Orientalist knowledge, defining and fixing the meaning of terms such that usages from within the Orient itself are denied sense:
“[T]here are all sorts of slippages and double standards in the use of words like "realism", "pragmatism", and other words like "secular" and "democracy" that need complete rethinking and reevaluation. Reality is too complex and multifarious to lend itself to jejune formulae like "a democratic Iraq amenable to us would result". Such reasoning cannot stand the test of reality. Meanings are not imposed from one culture on to another any more than one language and one culture alone possesses the secret of how to get things done efficiently.” (Said, 2003a, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/652/op1.htm)
Underlining the importance of Orientalism and consequent forms of racism today, Said argues that imperial power is not maintained wholly or even mainly by military might. Lying behind the military is authority which puts that power to use when necessary. Said uses the Foucauldian model of ‘the gaze’ to offer an account of the power-knowledge that enables imperialism. This resides in “imperial perspective”. In relation to the Middle East imperial perspective operates as a form of racist Orientalist understanding, “that way of looking at a distant foreign reality by subordinating it to one's gaze, constructing its history from one's own point of view, seeing its people as subjects whose fate is to be decided not by them but by what distant administrators think is best for them.” (Said, 2003b, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/648/op2.htm) This Orientalist imperial perspective enables the idea to develop that empire is benign and necessary. For Said, generations of Americans have grown to understand Islam and Arabs in deeply misleading, racist and Orientalist terms. In this context, ignorance translates into knowledge, that special Orientalist, racist kind of knowing: “Underlying this particular imperial perspective is a long-standing Orientalist view that will not permit the Arabs as a people to exercise their right to national self-determination. They are thought of as different, incapable of logic, unable to tell the truth, fundamentally disruptive and murderous.” (Said, 2003b, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/648/op2.htm)
His 2003 preface to Orientalism suggests that perhaps Said’s thinking about the purpose of the book has shifted over the years. In 2003, he rebuts the postmodernist dismissal of ‘humanism’ to proclaim Orientalism “a humanist critique to open up the fields of struggle”. He goes on to defend humanism as an attempt “to use one’s mind historically and rationally for the purposes of reflective understanding and genuine disclosure. Moreover, humanism is sustained by a sense of community with other interpreters and other societies and periods: strictly speaking, therefore, there is no such thing as an isolated humanist.” (Said, 2003c, p.xvii) He expands upon this point to locate his work within the tradition of philology exemplified by such figures as Auerbach whose Weltliteratur (after Goethe, “a study of all the literatures of the world as a symphonic whole which could be apprehended theoretically as having preserved the individuality of each work without losing sight of the whole” (Said, 2003c, p.xviii)) involved a “hospitality” towards the Other. In such philology, “the interpreter’s mind actively makes a place in it for a foreign Other. And this creative making of a place for works that are otherwise alien and distant is the most important facet of the interpreter’s philological mission.” (Said, 2003c, p.xix) Ultimately then, at the end of his life, Said is explicit about the purpose of his work in identifying the need to close the gap between self and ‘the Other’, to find new kinds of knowledge which transcend Orientalized and racialized thought. Said makes a distinction between types of knowledge. Unlike his great influence Foucault, he sees a variety of knowledge which is more genuine or valuable, which is the result of understanding and compassion, and which offers an analysis of people for their own sakes. This contrasts with types of knowing such as racist or Orientalist knowledge which is part of an “overall campaign of self-affirmation” (Said, 2003c, p.xiv). Again, breaking with the more totalising model of Foucault, he states “There is, after all, a profound difference between the will to understand for purposes of co-existence and humanistic enlargement of horizons, and the will to dominate for the purposes of control and external dominion.” (ibid.)
Finally, returning to the matter of the Enlightenment with which we began, we note that Said denies the thinking which would emphasize the importance or uniqueness of the Enlightenment. There are those like Ayaan Hirsi Ali (2006) who insist it is time for Muslims to have their own Enlightenment. In contrast, and in relation to the concept of dignity, Said writes, “ it is a radically wrong Orientalist and indeed racist proposition to accept that, unlike Europeans or Americans, Arabs have no sense of individuality, no regard for individual life, no values that express love, intimacy and understanding, which are supposed to be the property exclusively of cultures such as those of Europe and America, which had … an Enlightenment” (Said, 2005, pp.292-3 ) Rather he wants to argue for the dignity of all humans irrespective of their people’s historical experience of particular intellectual movements. The patterns of racialised thinking which have emerged in both western and non-western cultures since the enlightenment are complex and, as we will see, often continue to play on constructions of ‘otherness’. In the next three weeks we will examine how the debate around Islam, and, both separately and interrelatedly, that around terrorism have played into recent manifestations of Orientalism, racialization and racism, and into the construction of ‘racial’ categories such as those of ‘the Arab’ we have discussed today.
Bibliography
Banton, M., (1991), ‘The race relations problematic’, British Journal of Sociology 42 (1) pp. 115-130
Goldberg, D. (1990) Anatomy of Racism Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
Hirsi Ali, A. (2006) The Caged Virgin : a Muslim woman's cry for reason, London : Free Press
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Said, E. (2003a) ‘Dreams and delusions’, Al-Ahram Weekly, 562, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/652/op1.htm, accessed 10/07/06
Said, E. (2003b) ‘Imperial Perspectives’, Al-Ahram Weekly, 648, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/648/op2.htm, accessed 10/07/06
Said, E. (2003c) ‘Preface (2003)’ in Said, E., Orientalism, London: Penguin Books
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