Worksheet:
Edward Said, Introduction to Orientalism II & III, questions for discussion

1. Explain in your own words how “such locales, regions, geographical sectors as ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’ are man-made.”

2. If “the West” and the Orient” are man-made ideas, is it also accurate to say that “Japan,” for example, or “France,” or “the United States,” or “India” are ideas? If so, what kind of ideas are they? Whose ideas were they at first? Whose ideas are they now?

3. On pages 5 and 6 Said outlines three “qualifications” about what he is saying about the discourse of Orientalism. In your own words, what are these qualifications?

4. Regarding the first of Said’s qualifications, what does he mean when he writes that “there were—and are—cultures and nations whose location is in the East, and their lives, histories, and customs have a brute reality obviously greater than anything that could be said about them in the West” (p. 5)? Might we also say that “there were—and are—peoples and cultures whose location is far away, and their lives, histories, and customs have a brute reality greater than anything that could be said about them in Japan”?

5. Said’s second qualification is more provocative than the first, and I want to call special attention to it. It is a point to which he will return, and to which we will return again and again in this course. The reference in his example of the “configurations of power” that characterized the relation of “West” and “Orient” is to L’education sentimentale (1869) by Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880). All italics in the passage are Said’s:

Ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be understood or studied without their force, or more precisely their configurations of power, also being studied . . . . The relationship of Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony . . . . The Orient was Orientalized not only because it was discovered to be “Oriental” in all the ways considered commonplace by an average nineteenth-century European, but also because it could be—that is, submitted to being—made Oriental. There is very little consent to be found, for example, in the fact that Flaubert’s encounter with an Egyptian courtesan produced a widely influential model of the Oriental woman: she never spoke of herself, she never represented her emotions, presence, or history. He spoke for and represented her. He was foreign, comparatively wealthy, male, and these were historical facts of domination that allowed him not only to possess Kuchuk Hanem physically but to speak for her and tell his readers in what way she was “typically Oriental.” My argument is that Flaubert’s situation of strength in relation to Kuchuk Hanem was not an isolated instance. It fairly stands for the pattern of relative strength between East and West, and the discourse about the Orient that it enabled.

So, according to Said, the discourse of Orientalism was (and is) related very closely to power. Do you suppose this is true of all discourse? What about, for example, the Japanese discourse about, say, China, or Egypt, or the United States? Are these related to power? If so (and of course I want to say that this is so) what kind of power is it? From where does it come? Whose power is it?

6. Said’s discussion of a “distinction between pure and political knowledge” begins on page 9 and runs nearly through page 15. It seems to me that this is among the more difficult passages in the introduction. Can you summarize in two or three sentences Said’s main point in these pages?

7. I’m not particularly interested in the material on pages 16 to 20, and so unless there’s something there that catches your interest we’ll skip that part. Anything in these pages that you want to discuss?

8. My interest picks up again at the bottom of page 20 when Said begins talking about “exteriority” and “representation.” What does he mean by these terms? What does he mean (p. 21) when he says “the principle product of exteriority is representation”?

9. What does Said mean when he writes (p. 22) that “Orientalism responded more to the culture that produced it than to its putative object, which was also produced by the West”? What does this have to do with discourse? With exteriority? With representation?

10. Who was Raymond Williams? What do you suppose he meant when he wrote about the “unlearning” of “the inherent dominative mode”? This must be important to Said, since he ends the introduction by quoting Williams. What is the relation between “unlearning the inherent dominative mode” and Orientalism? What is the relation between “unlearning the inherent dominative mode” and discourse?