SOC209H1 Chapter Notes - Chapter 5: Edward Said, Antonio Gramsci, Palestinians

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27 May 2018
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Edward Said: Orientalism Documentary
Orientalism revolutionized the study of the Middle East and helped to create and shape new
fields of study, such as post-colonial theory as well as influencing disciplines as diverse as
English, anthropology, and cultural studies.
Orientalism answers the question that why when we think of the Middle East, we have a pre-
conceived notion of the kind of people who live there, what they believe, etc. How we come to
judge people by simply observing their skin. The central argument of orientalism is that the way
we acquire this knowledge is not innocent or objective, but an end result of a process that we
flex certain interests. We look at them through a lens called orientalism.
Why Said studied orientalism.
1. Arab Israeli war of 93. Everyone thought Arab was cowards, but then Egyptian army
crossed the canal and showed they can fight like anybody else.
2. Constant disparity that he felt between his experience of being an Arab, and the
representations of that in Art.
The Repertory of Orientalism
If somebody in the 1850s in Paris or London, wished to talk/read about Indian or Egypt or Syria.
There would be very little chance for that person to simply address the subject as we like to
think in a free or creative way as a great deal of writing had gone before. There was a repertory
of images coming up, like the East is a mysterious place full of secrets and monsters. This even
extended to descriptions by Experts who had studied Arabs.
Orientalism and Empire
Said bases orientalism on a historical context. Specifically he locates the construction of
orientalism, within the history of imperial conquest. As empires spread across the globe,
historically the British and the French, they not only conquer militarily, but also ideologically.
The question for these empires is, that how do we understand the natives that we are
conquering so we can subdue them easier. This process of using large abstract categories to
describe people who look different, has been going on for a long time. But orientalism makes
this general process more formal as it presents itself as objective knowledge.
Said classifies Napoleons conquest of Egypt in 1798 as marking a new kind of imperial and
colonial context that inaugurates the project of orientalism. This was different because he not
only invaded it with soldiers, but also brought scientists whose job is to record Egypt and record
a scientific survey of Egypt which was designed not for the Egyptians, but for the Europeans.
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