Worksheet:
Edward Said, Introduction to Orientalism I, questions for discussion

1. Where is Beirut?

2. Who were Chateaubriand and Nerval? When did they live? What do they have to do with Beirut?

3. What could Said mean when he says (p. 1) that the Orient “was almost a European invention”?

4. Why would a “representation” of the Orient have a “privileged communal significance for the [French] journalist and his French readers” (p. 1)? What does “representation” mean in this sentence? What does “privileged” mean when used in this way?

5. What does Said mean when he says (p. 1) that for Europe the Orient has been among the “deepest and most recurring images of the Other”? What does “Other” mean when used in this way?

6. On page 2 Said begins an extended definition of “Orientalism” that runs through the middle of page 3. What are his three main “meanings” of the term?

7. Regarding Said’s second “meaning” of Orientalism he says that it is a “style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction between ‘the Orient’ and . . . ‘the Occident’” (p. 2). What could that mean? What is the meaning of “ontological”? What is the meaning of “epistemological”? How could a “style of thought” be based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction?

8. Who were Aeschylus, Victor Hugo, Dante, and Karl Marx? When and where did they live? Why are they remembered?

9. Who was Michel Foucault? When and where did he live? Why is he remembered? (See the links page for help.)

10. Said mentions the “post-Enlightenment period” (p. 3). What was the Enlightenment?

Note from DE:

A central concept in Said’s work and thought, and in this class, and in my own writing and thinking about culture and nation and many other things, is what Foucault and others have called a “discourse.” If we look in a dictionary we’ll find several definitions for “discourse,” but none of these come very close to what Foucault and Said have in mind, and so we have a difficulty. Yet Said says on page 3 that “without examining Orientalism as a discourse” we “cannot possibly understand” what he is talking about. Those are strong words, and fair warning. We’ll have to get clear about the concept of a discourse, then, or risk badly misunderstanding what Said says, and what I shall be saying in this course.

Foucault’s own writing on the subject in the books Said mentions, The Archaeology of Knowledge and Discipline and Punish, is famously difficult, but fortunately Said himself, particularly in this introduction to Orientalism and beginning in this first section, is fairly clear about what he means by the term. Let’s have a look at several things he says, and try to “read between the lines,” so to speak:

a. The discourse of Orientalism is related in some way to an “enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively” (p. 3).

(11) This “discourse” must be an awfully powerful thing, no? It seems to me that it’s fairly easy to understand how particular kinds of academic practices, styles of thought, and related powerful institutions could help manage a particular other place, but how could they produce the other place? Said says that this discourse, this “enormously systematic discipline,” produced the Orient. What could this possibly mean?

b. The discourse of Orientalism was so “authoritative,” Said says further (p. 3), that “no one writing, thinking, or acting on the Orient could do so without taking account of the limitations on thought and action imposed by Orientalism” (italics mine).

(12) Again, those are strong words. Look at that “no one . . . could.” Said says that it was and is impossible to write about or to think about the Orient without “taking account” of the discourse. What could this mean? And look at the words I have italicized. A discourse, or at least this discourse, limits both thought and action. It must be a powerful thing indeed to limit the thoughts and actions of anyone in any way connected with it, don’t you think? What do you suppose Said means when he says that a discourse can limit thought and action? What kind of a thing must it be to do that?

c. “In brief, because of [the discourse of] Orientalism the Orient was not (and is not) a free subject of thought or action” (p. 3).

(13) There’s that idea of limitation and impossibility again, except put in even stronger terms. A discourse, Said says, makes some subjects, the Orient in this case, impossible to think about or to act about freely. Discourse, in other words, stops free thought and free action. The thoughts and actions of all people connected with the discourse are not free, are determined by the discourse. What can this mean? How can a discourse limit the ways we think and act, or even make it completely impossible for us to think and act in certain ways?

d. This discourse is a “whole network of interests” that are “inevitably brought to bear on (and . . . always involved in) any occasion” in which the subject of the discourse, in this case the Orient, is in question (p. 3, italics mine).

(14) “Inevitably,” again, has to do with cause and effect and limitation. The discourse is a network of thoughts, texts, ideas, concepts, representations, imaginings and institutions (notice the similarity of “network” to the “enormously systematic discipline” of the quote above) that always, in all cases, for every person in every situation, makes it impossible to think or act in certain ways. How can this be?

15. Said writes on page 4 of a “complex array of ‘Oriental’ ideas,” and mentions specifically “Oriental despotism,” “Oriental splendor,” Oriental “cruelty,” and Oriental “sensuality.” What is he talking about? Of what are these examples? How are they related to the discourse of Orientalism?

16. What does Said mean when he writes that “Eastern sects, philosophies, and wisdoms” have been “domesticated for local European use” (p. 4)? How can the religions, philosophies, and wisdoms of one group of people be “domesticated” for another group of people? What does “domesticated” mean in such a sentence? What do you suppose this has to do with the concept of a discourse?

17. In a work that may be assigned later in this course, Yoshioka Hiroshi’s “Samurai and Self-Colonization in Japan” (in The Decolonization of Imagination, 1995), Yoshioka makes a similar point about all outside information, not just outside religions, philosophies, and wisdoms, in Japan:

Japan lacks the distribution of heterogeneous and multiple types of information. Information is excessively uniform and politically neutralized so that people are hardly aware of other angles from which to look at a situation. The amount of information itself is great, but every alien element is eliminated from it (p. 106).

Outside (or “Other”) information in Japan, in other words, according to Yoshioka, has been “domesticated for local Japanese use,” so to speak. Could it be that this has happened, if it has happened, because of the limitations on thought and action that characterize a discourse?

Could it be that just as a “Western” discourse “ managed and produced” the Orient, making it impossible to think of the Orient in any but determined ways, a Japanese discourse has managed and produced the entire world outside?