Edward said torrent

A fatal medical diagnosis in convinced Edward Said that he should leave a record of where he was born and spent his childhood, and so with this memoir he rediscovers the lost Arab world of his early years in Palestine, Lebanon, and Egypt.

Said writes with great passion and wit about his family and his friends from his birthplace in Jerusalem, schools in Cairo, and summers in the mountains above Beirut, to boarding school and college in the United States, revealing an unimaginable world of rich, colorful characters and exotic eastern landscapes.

Underscoring all is the confusion of identity the young Said experienced as he came to terms with the dissonance of being an American citizen, a Christian and a Palestinian, and, ultimately, an outsider. This idea of constituting Identity through Difference points, again, not to the realm of political economy.

Naturally, this means that the study of this phenomenon moves from the ambit of political economy to cultural history. But it is not just that colonial expansion appears to be an artifact of discourse. I propose to teach you a lesson in how to argue and how to make points. In the rest of this essay, I purpose to build upon those early interventions to push further in the same direction.

Orientalism could not have generated modern colonialism, or even contributed to it in any significant way. Its roots, therefore, have to be sought in political economy, not in European culture — much as materialists had argued for decades. Said is correct in his observation that ethnocentric and essentializing depictions of the East were widespread among European observers from the earliest times.

The question is what explanatory role such depictions are accorded in the rise of European colonialism. We have seen in the preceding section that Said clearly assigns considerable importance to them in this regard. Just what the causal chain is that connects them to it, and how important they are compared to other factors, is murky. But we can be confident that the role is important, since he never qualifies it, nor feels compelled to embed it in a wider discussion of how it combined with other forces that pushed Britain and France outward in the modern era.

And, by extension, the promotion of culture as a central explanatory factor in the latter process must also be demoted. The same essentialized and ethnocentric conceptions were typical of Eastern understandings of the West. Hence, the texts we have from Arab, Persian, and Indian descriptions of European culture from precolonial times are no less parochial in their descriptions of Europe and its people, and no less prone to generalize across time and space.

Indeed, it is hard to imagine any description of a culture that can escape the tendency to categorize, to generalize across cases, and to schematize in some way or form. The fact is that aspects of Western scholarship of the East that Said takes to be Orientalist are found in many instances of cross-cultural observation. One ought again to remember that all cultures impose corrections upon raw reality, changing it from free-floating objects into units of knowledge.

The problem is not that conversion takes place. It is perfectly natural for the human mind to resist the assault on it of untreated strangeness; therefore cultures have always been inclined to impose complete transformations on other cultures, receiving these other cultures not as they are but as, for the benefit of the receiver, they ought to be.

For if the urge to categorize, essentialize, and generalize about other cultures — which Said insists is what Orientalism does — is common to all cultures, then how can it explain the rise of modern colonialism, which is a project specific to particular nations?

In other words, if this mindset was common to many cultures, then it cannot have been what generated colonialism, since the latter was particular to a few nations in mostly Western Europe. At the very least, we can distinguish between a strong version of it and a weak one:. The strong version proposes that once the Orientalist mindset was in place, it could, on its own, generate modern colonialism.

In this view, no other contributing factor was needed to bring about the result. Hence, it would predict that any country that viewed other cultures through this prism would embark on colonial expansion. The burden here would be to propose that even if latent Orientalism could not, by itself, generate colonialism, it was nonetheless an essential part of the combination of factors that did bring it about.

It would be what John Mackie referred to as an INUS condition: a necessary but insufficient component of an unnecessary but sufficient causal complex.

Thus, it might be that economic interest or political ambitions were also critical in generating the British or French thrust into the Middle East. The search for oil, the desire to find new markets, the need to secure geopolitical advantage by capturing key ports — all these might have been critical motivating factors for the European powers.

The weaker argument would be able to accommodate all these into an explanation for the rise of modern imperialism. It would not have to claim that racial prejudice alone was what drove the Europeans outward, but it could still insist that these other factors would not have been sufficient for the outcome on their own.

Without the mindset created by the already existing latent Orientalism, the other factors might have remained inert, unable to muster the force needed to launch the project.

But while it has a surface appeal, this version also fails for two reasons. The first has to do with the internal structure of the argument. In that sense, the place of the broader causal complex is secure. The question is, once the economic motivation is in place, will its proponents also require the psychological orientation generated by Orientalism to undertake the colonial project? It might seem that the answer is an obvious yes, because it could be claimed that a process as brutal and costly as colonialism could not be undertaken without some moral or ethical justification — not just for the wider public but for its practitioners.

Moral agents could not engage in oppressive practices, they could not terrorize other human beings, unless they believed that the endeavor served a higher purpose. And this is what Orientalism provided them, with its claims to civilize and educate the natives.

The ethnic and racial domination implied by modern colonialism would thus be perceived by its progenitors as a moral undertaking, not just as the naked pursuit of power and profit. This is the sense in which Orientalism might be suggested to be necessary, albeit insufficient, as a causal factor in the expansion of European rule.

But what this argument would overlook is that it is not the rationalizing function of Orientalism that is in question, but the need for it to be already present in European culture at the inception of the imperial project. Thus, materialist arguments could easily allow that an economically motivated project is greatly facilitated by a discourse that rationalizes the project on moral grounds. But they would deny the stronger proposition that, had the discourse not been in place, the project would have stalled or failed to be launched.

This is so because, once the economic interest is in place, there is an endogenously generated pressure to create a justifying discourse for the project, even where such a discourse does not already exist. Dominant agents are not impeded by the fact they do not have, ready at hand, a rationalizing ideology. Where it does not exist, they cobble one together. This is, after all, the main function of intellectuals — to serve ruling groups by crafting an ideology that justifies their dominance on moral grounds.

For even the weak version of his second argument to succeed, it has to establish that, had British and French elites not had the intellectual resources of Orientalism already available to them, this absence would have been an obstacle to their colonial project. Without this claim, the second argument collapses into a materialist one. If Said were to agree that, even if Orientalism had not been available as an academic discipline, even if latent Orientalism had been absent from the scene, its basic elements could have nonetheless been crafted ex nihilo in order to justify colonial rule — then he would be suggesting that latent Orientalism was not, in fact, a necessary part of the causal complex that brought about colonialism.

If it is conceded that colonial elites were capable of generating their own rationalizing discourse, then latent Orientalism fails even as a necessary component of the forces behind colonialism. We are now back to the materialist argument that ruling classes create the ideology needed for their reproduction, and not the other way around. Once it is admitted that essentializing descriptions of other cultures were common across East and West, and once we recognize that other motivations were enough to propel states outward, then it cannot be maintained that the mindset created by these descriptions was in any way responsible for the colonial project.

What was, in fact, responsible was what Marxists and progressive nationalists had been suggesting for a century prior to the publication of Orientalism : the material interests and capacities of particular social formations in the West. The admission injects a deep and unresolvable contradiction in one of his fundamental claims. This is especially true of the United States, which today can only be described as an enormous palimpsest of different races and cultures sharing a problematic history of conquests, exterminations, and of course major cultural and political achievements.

Orientalism is such a book. If the knowledge of orientalism has any meaning, it is in being a reminder of the seductive degradation of knowledge, of any knowledge, anywhere, at anytime. The best nonfiction books: No 8 — Orientalism by Edward Said Edward Said: Myth and misinterpretation of 'the orient'. Read more. Christopher Hitchens: My friend Edward Said.