orientalism - RACISM & NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS ...

ORIENTALISM
Also by the author
Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography
Beginnings: Intention and Method ORIENTALISM
Edward W. Said Routledge & Kegan Paul
London and Henley
First published in 1978
by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.
39 Store Street,
London WCIE 7DD, and
Broadway House,
Newton Road,
Henley-on-Thames,
Oxon RG9 1EN
Reprinted and first published
as a paperback in 1980
Set in Times Roman
and printed in Great Britain by
Redwood Burn Limited
Trowbridge & Esher © Edward W. Said 1978
No Part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from
the publisher, except for the quotation of brief passage in criticism. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Said, Edward W.
Orientalism,
1. East - Study and teaching
I. Title
950'.07 DS32.8 78-40534
ISBN 0 7100 0040 5
ISBN 0 7100 0555 5 Pbk Grateful acknowledgements is made to the following for permission to
reprint previously published material:
George Allen & Unwin Ltd.: Excerpts from Subject of the Day: Being a
Selection of Speeches and Writings by George Nathaniel Curzon.
George Allen & Unwin Ltd.: Excerpts from Revolution in the Middle East and
Other Case Studies, proceedings of a seminar, edited by P. J. Vatikiotis.
American Jewish Committee: Excerpts from "The Return of Islam" by Bernard
Lewis, in Commentary, vol. 61, no. 1 (January 1976).Reprinted from
Commentary by permission.Copyright © 1976 by the American Jewish
Committee.
Basic Books, Inc.: Excerpts from "Renan's Philological Laboratory" by
Edward W. Said, in Art, Politics, and Will: Essarys in Honor of Lionel
Trilling, edited by Quentin Anderson et al. Copyright © 1977 by Basic
Books, Inc.
The Bodley Head and McIntosh & Otis, Inc.: Excerpts from Flaubert in Egypt,
translated and edited by Franscis Steegmuller.Reprinted by permission of
Francis Steegmuller and The Bodley Head.
Jonathan Cape, Ltd., and The Letters of T.E. Lawrence Trust: Excerpt from
the Letters of T.E. Lawrence, edited by David Garnett.
Jonathan Cape, Ltd., The Seven Pillars Trust, and Doubleday & Co., Inc.:
Excerpt from The Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A triumph by T.E.
Lawrence.Copyright 1962, 1935 by Doubleday & Co., Inc.
Doubleday & Co., Inc., amd A.P. Watt & Sons, LTd: Excerpt from Verse by
Rudyyard Kipling.
The Georgia Review: Excerpts from "Orientalism," which originally appeared
in the Georgia Review (Sprint 1977), Copyright © 1977 by the Unuiversity of
Georgia.
Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.: Excerpt from a poem by Borniers (1862),
Quoted in De Lesseps of Suez by Charles Beatty.
Macmillar & Co., London and Basingstoke: Excerpts from Modern Egypt, vol,
2, by Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer.
Macmillian Publishing Co., Inc.: Excerpt from "Propaganda" by Harold
Lasswell,in The Encyclopedia of the Social Siences,edited by Edwin
R.A.Seligman,vol.12(1934).
Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., and A.P. Watt & sons, LTd.: Excerpt from
"Byzantium" by William Butler Yeats, in The Collected Poems. Copyright 1933
by Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., renewed 1961 by Bertha Georgie Yeats.
The New York Times company: Excerpts from "Arabs, Islam, and the Dogmas of
the West" by Edward W. Said, in The New York Times Book Review, October 31,
1976.Copyright©1976 by the New York Times Compnay.Reprinted by permission.
Northwestern University Press: Excerpt from "The Arab Portrayed" by Edward
W. Said, in The Arab-Israeli Confrontation of June 1967: An Arab
Perspective, edited by Ibrahim Abu-Lughod. Copyright © 1970 by Northwestern
University Press.
Prentice-Hall Inc.: Excerpt from The Persians by Aeschylus, translated by
Anthony J. Podleck.Copyright © 1970 by Prentice-Hall, Inc.
The Royal Asiatic Society, Great Britain and Ireland: Excerpt from "Louis
Massignon (1882-1962)," in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1962)
University of California Press: Excerpts from Modern Islam: The Search for
Cultural Identity by Gustave von Grunebaum.Copyright ©1962 by the Regents
of the University of California.
University of Chicago Press: Excerpts from Modern Trends in Islam by H.A.R.
Gibb.
FOR JANET AND IBRAHIM
Contents
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 The Scope of Orientalism I. Knowing the Oriental 31
II. Imaginative Geography an Its Representaions:
Orientalizing the Oriental 49
III. Project 73
IV. Crisis 92 Chapter 2 Orientalist Structures and Restructures I. Redrawn Frontiers, Redefined Issues, Secularized Religion 113
II. Silverstre de Sacy and Ernest Renan: Rational Anthropology
and Philogical Laboratory 123
III. Oriental Residence and Scholarship:
The Requirements of Lexicography and Imagination 149
IV. Pilgrims and Pilgrimages, British and French 166 Chapter 3 Orientalism Now I. Latent and Manifest Orientalism 201
II. Style, Experience, Vision: Orientalisj's Worldiness 226
III. Modern Ango-French Orientalism in Fullest Flower 255
IV. The Latest Phase 284
Notes 329
Index 351 Acknowledgements
I have been reading about Orientalism for a number of years, but most of
this book was written during 1975-1976, which I spent as a Fellow at the
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioural Sciences, Stanfort,
California. In this unique and generous institution, it was my good fortune
not only to have benefited agreeably froms several colleagues, but also
from the help of Joan Warmbrunn, Chris Hoth, Jane Kielsmeier, Preston
Cutler, and the center's director, Gardner Lindzey. The list of friends,
colleagues, and students who read, or listened to, parts or the whole of
this manuscript is so long as to embarrass me, and now that it has finally
appeared as a book, perhaps even them, Nevertheless I should mention with
gratitude the always helpful encouragement of Janet and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod,
Noam Chomsky, and Roger Owen, who followed this project from its beginning
to its conclusion. Likewise I must gratefully acknowledge the helpful and
critical interest of the colleagues, friends, and students in various
places whose questions and discussion sharpened the text considerably.
Andre Schiffrin and Jeanne Morton of Pantheon Books were ideal publisher
and copy editor, respectively, and made the ordeal (for the author, at
least) of preparing the manuscript an instructive and genuinely intelligent
process. Marian Said helped me a great deal with her research on the early
modern history of Orientalist institutions. Apart from that, though, her
loving support really made much of the work on this book not only enjoyable
but possible.
E.W.S.
New York
Septemer-October 1977
They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.
-Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire
of Louis Bonaparte
The East is a career.
-Benjamin Disraeli, Tancred
Introduction
I On a visit to Beirut during the terrible civil war of 1975-1976 a French
journalist wrote regretfully of the gutted downtown area that "it had once
seemed to belong to . . . the Orient of Chateaubriand and Nerval."1 He was
right about the place, of course, especially so far as a European was
concerned. The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since
antiquity 'a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and
landscapes, remarkable experiences. Now it was disappearing; in a sense it
had happened, its time was over. Perhaps it seemed irrelevant that
Orientals themselves had something at stake in the process, that even in
the time of Chateaubriand and Nerval Orientals had lived there, and that
now it was they who were suffering; the main thing for the European visitor
was a European representation of the Orient and its contemporary fate, both
of which had a privileged communal significance for the journalist and his
French readers.
Americans will not feel quite the same about the Orient, which for them
is much more likely to be associated very differently with the Far East
(China and Japan, mainly). Unlike the Americans, the French and the British-
less so the Germans, Russians, Spanish, Portuguese, Italians, and Swiss-
have had a long tradition of what I shall be calling Orientation a way of
coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient's special place
in European Western experience. 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. In addition, the
Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West)
as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. Yet none of this
Orient is merely imaginative. The Orient is an integral of European
material civilization and culture. Orientalism expresses and represents
that part culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with
supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even
colonial bureaucracies an