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Orientalism Reconsidered
Author(s): Edward W. Said
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Cultural Critique, No. 1 (Autumn, 1985), pp. 89-107
Published by: University of Minnesota Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1354282

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Orientalism Reconsidered

Edward W. Said

T here are two sets of problems that I’d like to take up, each of them
deriving from the general issues addressed in Orientalism, of which

the most important are: the representation of other cultures, societies,
histories; the relationship between power and knowledge; the role of
the intellectual; the methodological questions that have to do with the
relationships between different kinds of texts, between text and con

–

text, between text and history.

I should make a couple of things clear at the outset, however. First of
all, I shall be using the word “Orientalism” less to refer to my book
than to the problems to which my book is related; moreover, I shall be
dealing, as will be evident, with the intellectual and political territory
covered both by Orientalism (the book) as well as the work I have done
since. This imposes no obligation on my audience to have read me
since Orientalism; I mention it only as an index of the fact that since writ-
ing Orientalism I have thought of myself as continuing to look at the
problems that first interested me in that book but which are still far
from resolved. Second, I would not want it to be thought that the
license afforded me by the present occasion is an attempt to answer my
critics. Fortunately, Orientalism elicited a great deal of comment, much
of it positive and instructive, yet a fair amount of it hostile and in some
cases (understandably) abusive. But the fact is that I have not digested
and understood everything that was either written or said. Instead, I
have grasped some of the problems and answers proposed by some of
my critics, and because they strike me as useful in focussing an argu-

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90 Edward W. Said

ment, these are the ones I shall be taking into account in the comments
that follow. Others – like my exclusion of German Orientalism, which
no one has given any reason for me to have included – have frankly
struck me as superficial or trivial, and there seems no point in even re-
sponding to them. Similarly, the claims made by Dennis Porter, among
others, that I am ahistorical and inconsistent, would have more in-
terest if the virtues of consistency (whatever may be intended by the
term) were subjected to rigorous analysis; as for my ahistoricity that too
is a charge more weighty in assertion than it is in proof.

Now let me quickly sketch the two sets of problems I’d like to deal
with here. As a department of thought and expertise, Orientalism of
course refers to several overlapping domains: firstly, the changing his-
torical and cultural relationship between Europe and Asia, a relation-
ship with a 4000 year old history; secondly, the scientific discipline in
the West according to which beginning in the early 19th century one
specialized in the study of various Oriental cultures and traditions;
and, thirdly, the ideological suppositions, images, and fantasies about
a currently important and politically urgent region of the world called
the Orient. The relatively common denominator between these three
aspects of Orientalism is the line separating Occident from Orient, and
this, I have argued, is less a fact of nature than it is a fact of human pro-
duction, which I have called imaginative geography. This is, however,
neither to say that the division between Orient and Occident is un-

changing nor is it to say that it is simply fictional. It is to say-
emphatically – that as with all aspects of what Vico calls the world of
nations, the Orient and the Occident are facts produced by human

beings, and as such must be studied as integral components of the
social, and not the divine or natural, world. And because the social
world includes the person or subject doing the studying as well as the

object or realm being studied, it is imperative to include them both in

any consideration of Orientalism, for, obviously enough, there could
be no Orientalism without, on the one hand, the Orientalists, and on
the other, the Orientals.

Far from being a crudely political apprehension of what has been
called the problem of Orientalism, this is in reality a fact basic to any
theory of interpretation, or hermeneutics. Yet, and this is the first set of

problems I want to consider, there is still a remarkable unwillingness
to discuss the problems of Orientalism in the political or ethical or
even epistemological contexts proper to it. This is as true of pro-

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Orientalism Reconsidered

fessional literary critics who have written about my book, as it is of
course of the Orientalists themselves. Since it seems to me patently
impossible to dismiss the truth of Orientalism’s political origin and its
continuing political actuality, we are obliged on intellectual as well as
political grounds to investigate the resistance to the politics of Orien-
talism, a resistance that is richly symptomatic of precisely what is
denied.

If the first set of problems is concerned with the problems of Orien-
talism reconsidered from the standpoint of local issues like who writes
or studies the Orient, in what institutional or discursive setting, for
what audience, and with what ends in mind, the second set of prob-
lems takes us to a wider circle of issues. These are the issues raised
initially by methodology and then considerably sharpened by ques-
tions as to how the production of knowledge best serves communal, as
opposed to factional, ends, how knowledge that is non-dominative
and non-coercive can be produced in a setting that is deeply inscribed
with the politics, the considerations. the positions, and the strategies of
power. In these methodological and moral re-considerations of Orien-
talism, I shall quite consciously be alluding to similar issues raised by
the experiences of feminism or women’s studies, black or ethnic
studies, socialist and anti-imperialist studies, all of which take for their
point of departure the right of formerly un- or mis-represented human
groups to speak for and represent themselves in domains defined,
politically and intellectually, as normally excluding them, usurping
their signifying and representing functions, overriding their historical
reality. In short, Orientalism reconsidered in this wider and libertarian
optic entails nothing less than the creation of new objects for a new
kind of knowledge.

But let me now return to the local problems I referred to first. The
hindsight of authors not only stimulates in them a sense of regret at
what they could or ought to have done but did not; it also gives them a
wider perspective in which to comprehend what they did. In my own
case, I have been helped to achieve this broader understanding by
nearly everyone who wrote about my book, and who saw it – for better
or worse – as being part of current debates, conflicts, and contested
interpretations in the Arab-Islamic world, as that world interacts with
the United States and Europe. Certainly there can be no doubt that
in my own rather limited case – the consciousness of being an Orien-
tal goes back to my youth in colonial Palestine and Egypt, although the

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92 Edward W. Said

impulse to resist its accompanying impingements was nurtured in the
heady atmosphere of the post-World War II period of independence
when Arab nationalism, Nasserism, the 1967 War, the rise of the Pales-
tine national movement, the 1973 War, the Lebanese Civil War, the
Iranian Revolution and its horrific aftermath produced that extraor-
dinary series of highs and lows which has neither ended nor allowed us
a full understanding of its remarkable revolutionary impact.

The interesting point here is how difficult it is to try to understand a
region of the world whose principal features seem to be, first, that it is
in perpetual flux, and second, that no one trying to grasp it can by an
act of pure will or of sovereign understanding stand at some Archime-
dean point outside the flux. That is, the very reason for understanding
the Orient generally and the Arab world in particular was first, that it
prevailed upon one, beseeched one’s attention urgently, whether for
economic, political, cultural, or religious reasons, and second, that it
defied neutral, disinterested, or stable definition.

Similar problems are commonplace in the interpretation of literary
texts. Each age, for instance, re-interprets Shakespeare, not because
Shakespeare changes, but because despite the existence of numerous
and reliable editions of Shakespeare, there is no such fixed and non-
trivial object as Shakespeare independent of his editors, the actors who
played his roles, the translators who put him in other languages, the
hundreds of millions of readers who have read him or watched perfor-
mances of his plays since the late sixteenth century. On the other hand, it
is too much to say that Shakespeare has no independent existence at
all, and that he is completely reconstituted every time someone reads,
acts, or writes about him. In fact Shakespeare leads an institutional or
cultural life that among other things has guaranteed his eminence as a
great poet, his authorship of thirty-odd plays, his extraordinary canon-
ical powers in the West. The point I am making here is a rudimentary
one: that even so relatively inert an object as a literary text is commonly
supposed to gain some of its identity from its historical moment
interacting with the attentions, judgements, scholarship, and perfor-
mances of its readers. But, I discovered, this privilege was rarely allowed
the Orient, the Arabs, or Islam, which separately or together were sup-
posed by mainstream academic thought to be confined to the fixed
status of an object frozen once and for all in time by the gaze of Western
percipients.

Far from being a defense either of the Arabs or Islam – as my book

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Orientalism Reconsidered

was taken by many to be – my argument was that neither existed
except as “communities of interpretation” which give them existence,
and that, like the Orient itself, each designation represented interests,
claims, projects, ambitions, and rhetorics that were not only in violent
disagreement, but were in a situation of open warfare. So saturated
with meanings, so overdetermined by history, religion, and politics are
labels like “Arab” or “muslim” as subdivisions of “The Orient” that no
one today can use them without some attention to the formidable
polemical mediations that screen the objects, if they exist at all, that the
labels designate.

I do not think it is too much to say that the more these observations
have been made by one party, the more routinely they are denied by
the other; this is true whether it is Arabs or Muslims discussing the
meaning of Arabism or Islam, or whether an Arab or Muslim disputes
these designations with a Western scholar. Anyone who tries to suggest
that nothing, not even a simple descriptive label, is beyond or outside
the realm of interpretation is almost certain to find an opponent saying
that science and learning are designed to transcend the vagaries of
interpretation, and that objective truth is in fact attainable. This claim
was more than a little political when used against Orientals who dis-
puted the authority and objectivity of an Orientalism intimately allied
with the great mass of European settlements in the Orient. At bottom,
what I said in Orientalism had been said before me by A.L. Tibawi, by
Abdullah Laroui, by Anwar Abdel Malek, by Talal Asad, by S.H.
Alatas, by Fanon and Cesaire, by Pannikar, and Romila Thapar, all of
whom had suffered the ravages of imperialism and colonialism, and
who, in challenging the authority, provenance, and institutions of the
science that represented them to Europe, were also understanding
themselves as something more than what this science said they
were.

Nor was this all. The challenge to Orientalism and the colonial era of
which it is so organically a part was a challenge to the muteness
imposed upon the Orient as object. Insofar as it was a science of incor-
poration and inclusion by virtue of which the Orient was constituted
and then introduced into Europe, Orientalism was a scientific move-
ment whose analogue in the world of empirical politics was the Orient’s
colonial accumulation and acquisition by Europe. The Orient was
therefore not Europe’s interlocutor, but its silent Other. From roughly
the end of the eighteenth century, when in its age, distance, and rich-

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94 Edward W. Said

ness the Orient was re-discovered by Europe, its history had been a
paradigm of antiquity and originality, functions that drew Europe’s
interests in acts of recognition or acknowledgement but from which
Europe moved as its own industrial, economic, and cultural develop-
ment seemed to leave the Orient far behind. Oriental history – for
Hegel, for Marx, later for Burkhardt, Nietzsche, Spengler, and other

major philosophers of history – was useful in portraying a region of
great age, and what had to be left behind. Literary historians have
further noted in all sorts of aesthetic writing and plastic portrayals that
a trajectory of “Westering,” found for example in Keats and Holderlin,
customarily saw the Orient as ceding its historical preeminence and
importance to the world spirit moving westwards away from Asia and
towards Europe.

As primitivity, as the age-old antetype of Europe, as a fecund night
out of which European rationality developed, the Orient’s actuality
receded inexorably into a kind of paradigmatic fossilization. The

origins of European anthropology and ethnography were constituted
out of this radical difference, and, to my knowledge, as a discipline
anthropology has not yet dealt with this inherent political limitation
upon its supposedly disinterested universality. This, by the way, is one
reason Johannes Fabian’s book, Time and The Other: How Anthropology
Constitutes Its Object is both so unique and so important; compared, say,
with the standard disciplinary rationalizations and self-congratulatory
cliches about hermeneutic circles offered by Clifford Geertz, Fabian’s
serious effort to re-direct anthropologists’ attention back to the dis-

crepancies in time, power, and development between the ethnograph-
er and his/her constituted object is all the more remarkable. In any
event, what for the most part got left out of Orientalism was precisely
the very history that resisted its ideological as well as political encroach-
ments, and this repressed or resistant history has returned in the
various critiques and attacks upon Orientalism, which has uniformly
and polemically been represented by these critiques as a science of
imperialism.

The divergences between the numerous critiques made of Orien-
talism as ideology and praxis, at least so far as their aims are concerned,
are very wide nonetheless. Some attack Orientalism as a prelude to
assertions about the virtues of one or another native culture: these are
the nativists. Others criticize Orientalism as a defense against attacks
on one or another political creed: these are the nationalists. Still others

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Orientalism Reconsidered

criticize Orientalism for falsifying the nature of Islam: these are, grosso
modo, the fundamentalists. I will not adjudicate between these claims,
except to say that I have explicitly avoided taking stands on such mat-
ters as the real, true, or authentic Islamic or Arab world, except as
issues relating to conflicts involving partisanship, solidarity, or sym-
pathy, although I have always tried never to forsake a critical sense or
reflective detachment. But in common with all the recent critics of
Orientalism I think that two things are especially important – one, a
rigorous methodological vigilance that construes Orientalism less as a
positive than as a critical discipline and therefore makes it subject to
intense scrutiny, and two, a determination not to allow the segregation
and confinement of the Orient to go on without challenge. My own
understanding of this second point has led me to the extreme position
of entirely refusing designations like “Orient” and “Occident,” but
this is something I shall return to a little later.

Depending on how they construed their roles as Orientalists, critics
of the critics of Orientalism have either reinforced the affirmations of
positive power lodged within Orientalism’s discourse, or much less
frequently alas, they have engaged Orientalism’s critics in a genuine
intellectual exchange. The reasons for this split are self-evident: some
have to do with power and age, as well as institutional or guild defen-
siveness; others have to do with religious or ideological convictions.
All, irrespective of whether the fact is acknowledged or not, are political
– something that not everyone has found easy to acknowledge. If I
may take use of my own example, when some of my critics in particular
agreed with the main premises of my argument they tended to fall back
on encomia to the achievements of what one of their most dis-
tinguished individuals, Maxime Rodinson, called “la science orien-
taliste.” This view lent itself to attacks on an alleged Lysenkism lurking
inside the polemics of Muslims or Arabs who lodged a protest with
“Western” Orientalism, despite the fact that all the recent critics of
Orientalism have been quite explicit about using such “Western” cri-
tiques as Marxism or structuralism in an effort to override invidious
distinctions between East and West, between Arab and Western truth,
and the like.

Sensitized to the outrageous attacks upon an august and formerly
invulnerable science, many accredited members of the certified pro-
fessional cadre, whose division of study is the Arabs and Islam, have
disclaimed any politics at all, while pressing a vigorous, but for the

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96 Edward W. Said

most part intellectually empty and ideologically intended, counter-
attack. Although I said I would not respond to critics here, I need to
mention a few of the more typical imputations made against me so that
you can see Orientalism extending its 19th-century arguments to cover
a whole incommensurate set of late 20th-century eventualities, all of
them deriving from what to the 19th-century mind is the preposterous
situation of an Oriental responding to Orientalism’s asseverations. For
sheer heedless anti-intellectualism, unrestrained or unencumbered
by the slightest trace of critical self-consciousness, no one, in my
experience, has achieved the sublime confidence of Bernard Lewis,
whose almost purely political exploits require more time to mention
than they are worth. In a series of articles and one particularly weak
book – The Muslim Discovery of Europe – Lewis has been busy respond-
ing to my argument, insisting that the Western quest for knowledge
about other societies is unique, that it is motivated by pure curiosity,
and that in contrast Muslims neither were able nor interested in getting
knowledge about Europe, as if knowledge about Europe were the only
acceptable criterion for true knowledge. Lewis’s arguments are pre-
sented as emanating exclusively from the scholar’s apolitical impar-
tiality, whereas at the same time he has become an authority drawn on
for anti-Islamic, anti-Arab, Zionist, and Cold War crusades, all of them
underwritten by a zealotry covered with a veneer of urbanity that has
very little in common with the “science” and learning Lewis purports
to be upholding.

Not quite as hypocritical, but no less uncritical, are younger ideo-
logues and Orientalists like Daniel Pipes whose expertise as demon-
strated in his book In the Path of God: Islam and Political Power is wholly at
the service not of knowledge but of an aggressive and interventionary
State – the U.S. – whose interests Pipes helps to define. Even if we
leave aside the intellectually scandalous generalizing that allows Pipes
to speak of Islam’s anomie, its sense of inferiority, its defensiveness, as
if Islam were one simple thing, and as if the quality of his either absent
or impressionistic evidence were of the most secondary importance,
Pipes’s book testifies, I think, to Orientalism’s unique resilience, its
insulation from intellectual developments everywhere else in the cul-
ture, and its antediluvian imperiousness as it makes its assertions and
affirmations with little regard for logic or argument. I doubt that any
expert anywhere in the world would speak today ofJudaism or Chris-
tianity with quite that combination of force and freedom that Pipes

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Orientalism Reconsidered

allows himself about Islam, although one would have thought that a
book about Islamic revival would allude to parallel and related de-
velopments in styles of religious resurgence in, for example, Lebanon,
Israel, and the U.S. Nor is it likely that anyone anywhere, writing about
material forwhich, in his own words, “rumor, hearsay, and otherwisps
of evidence” are the only proof, will in the very same paragraph
alchemically transmute rumor and hearsay into “facts” on whose
“multitude” he relies in order “to reduce the importance of each.”
This is magic quite unworthy even of high Orientalism, and although
Pipes pays his obeisance to imperialist Orientalism he masters neither
its genuine learning nor its pretense at disinterestedness. For Pipes,
Islam is a volatile and dangerous business, a political movement inter-
vening in and disrupting the West, stirring up insurrection and fanat-
icism everywhere else.

The core of Pipes’s book is not simply its highly expedient sense of its
own political relevance to Reagan’s America where terrorism and
communism fade imperceptibly into the media’s images of Muslim
gunners, fanatics, and rebels, but its thesis that Muslims themselves
are the worst source for their own history. The pages ofIn the Path of God
are dotted with references to Islam’s incapacity for self-representation,
self-understanding, self-consciousness, and with praise for witnesses
like V.S. Naipaul who are so much more useful and clever in under-
standing Islam. Here, of course, is perhaps the most familiar of Orien-
talism’s themes – since the Orientals cannot represent themselves,
they must therefore be represented by others who know more about
Islam than Islam knows about itself. Now it is often the case that you can
be known by others in different ways than you know yourself, and that
valuable insights might be generated accordingly. But that is quite a dif-
ferent thing than pronouncing it as immutable law that outsiders ipsofacto
have a better sense of you as an insider than you do of yourself. Note
that there is no question of an exchange between Islam’s views and an
outsider’s: no dialogue, no discussion, no mutual recognition. There is
a flat assertion of quality, which the Western policy-maker, or his faith-
ful servant, possesses by virtue of his being Western, white, non-
Muslim.

Now this, I submit, is neither science, nor knowledge, nor under-
standing: it is a statement of power and a claim for relatively absolute
authority. It is constituted out of racism, and it is made comparatively
acceptable to an audience prepared in advance to listen to its muscular

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98 Edward W. Said

truths. Pipes speaks to and for a large clientele for whom Islam is not a
culture, but a nuisance; most of Pipes’s readers will, in their minds,
associate what he says about Islam with the other nuisances of the 60’s
and 70’s – blacks, women, post-colonial Third World nations that
have tipped the balance against the U.S. in such places as UNESCO and
the U.N., and for their pains have drawn forth the rebuke of Senator

Moynihan and Mrs. Kirkpatrick. In addition, Pipes – and the rows of
like-minded Orientalists and experts he represents as their common
denominator – stands for programmatic ignorance. Far from trying
to understand Islam in the context of imperialism and the revenge of
an abused, but internally very diverse, segment of humanity, far from

availing himself of the impressive recent work on Islam in different his-
tories and societies, far from paying some attention to the immense
advances in critical theory, in social science and humanistic research,
in the philosophy of interpretation, far from making some slight effort
to acquaint himself with the vast imaginative literature produced in the
Islamic world, Pipes obdurately and explicitly aligns himself with
colonial Orientalists like Snouck Hurgronje and shamelessly pro-
colonial renegrades like V.S. Naipaul, so that from the eyrie of the State

Department and the National Security Council he might survey and

judge Islam at will.
I have spent this much time talking about Pipes only because he

usefully serves to make some points about Orientalism’s large political
setting, which is routinely denied and suppressed in the sort of claim

proposed by its main spokesman, Bernard Lewis, who has the effron-
tery to disassociate Orientalism from its 200 year old partnership with

European imperialism and associate it instead with modern classical
philology and the study of ancient Greek and Roman culture. Perhaps
it is also worth mentioning about this larger setting that it comprises
two other elements, about which I’d like to speak very briefly, namely
the recent (but at present uncertain) prominence of the Palestinian
movement, and secondly, the demonstrated resistance of Arabs in the
United States and elsewhere against their portrayal in the public
realm.

As for the Palestinian issue – the question of Palestine and its fate-
ful encounter with Zionism, on the one hand, and the guild of Orien-
talism, its professional caste-consciousness as a corporation of experts
protecting their terrain and their credentials from outside scrutiny, on
the other hand, account for much of the animus against my critique of

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Orientalism Reconsidered

Orientalism. The ironies here are rich, and I shall restrict myself to
enumerating a small handful. Consider the case of one Orientalist who
publicly attacked my book (he told me in a private letter) not because
he disagreed with it – on the contrary, he felt that what I said was just
– but because he had to defend the honor of his profession!! Or, take
the connection – explicitly made by two of the authors I cite in Orien-
talism, Renan and Proust – between Islamophobia and anti-Semitism.
Here, one would have expected many scholars and critics to have seen
the conjuncture, that hostility to Islam in the modern Christian West
has historically gone hand in hand with, has stemmed from the same
source, has been nourished at the same stream as anti-Semitism, and
that a critique of the orthodoxies, dogmas, and disciplinary pro-
cedures of Orientalism contribute to an enlargement of our under-
standing of the cultural mechanisms of anti-Semitism. No such con-
nection has ever been made by critics, who have seen in the critique of
Orientalism an opportunity for them to defend Zionism, support
Israel, and launch attacks on Palestinian nationalism. The reasons for
this confirm the history of Orientalism, for, as the Israeli commentator
Dani Rubenstein has remarked, the Israeli occupation of the West
Bank and Gaza, the destruction of Palestinian society, and the sus-
tained Zionist assault upon Palestinian nationalism has quite literally
been led and staffed by Orientalists. Whereas in the past it was Euro-
pean Christian Orientalists who supplied European culture with argu-
ments for colonizing and suppressing Islam, as well as for despising
Jews, it is now theJewish national movement that produces a cadre of
colonial officials whose ideological theses about the Islamic or Arab
mind are implemented in the administration of the Palestinian Arabs,
an oppressed minority within the white-European-democracy that is
Israel. Rubenstein notes with some sorrow that the Hebrew Univer-
sity’s Islamic studies department has produced every one of the colo-
nial officials and Arab experts who run the Occupied Territories.

One further irony should be mentioned in this regard: just as some
Zionists have construed it as their duty to defend Orientalism against
its critics, there has been a comic effort by some Arab nationalists to see
the Orientalist controversy as an imperialist plot to enhance American
control over the Arab world. According to this seriously argued but
extraordinarily implausible scenario, we are informed that critics of
Orientalism turn out not to be anti-imperialist at all, but covert agents
of imperialism. The next step from this is to suggest that the best way to

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100 Edward W Said

attack imperialism is either to become an Orientalist or not to say any-
thing critical about it. At this stage, however, I concede that we have left
the world of reality for a world of such illogic and derangement that I
cannot pretend to understand its structure or sense.

Underlying much of the discussion of Orientalism is a disquieting
realization that the relationship between cultures is both uneven and
irremediably secular. This brings us to the point I alluded to a moment
ago, about recent Arab and Islamic efforts, well-intentioned for the
most part, but sometimes motivated by unpopular regimes, who, in
attracting attention to the shoddiness of the Western media in repre-
senting the Arabs or Islam, divert scrutiny from the abuses of their rule
and therefore make efforts to improve the so-called image of Islam and
the Arabs. Parallel developments have been occurring, as no one
needs to be told, in UNESCO where the controversy surrounding the
world information order – and proposals for its reform by various
Third World and Socialist governments – has taken on the dimen-
sions of a major international issue. Most of these disputes testify, first
of all, to the fact that the production of knowledge, or information, of
media images, is unevenly distributed: its locus and the centers of its

greatest force are located in what, on both sides of the divide, has been

polemically called the metropolitan West. Second, this unhappy real-
ization, on the part of weaker parties and cultures, has reinforced their

grasp of the fact that, although there are many divisions within it, there
is only one secular and historical world, and that neither nativism, nor
divine intervention, nor regionalism, nor ideological smokescreens
can hide societies, cultures, and peoples from each other, especially
not from those with the force and will to penetrate others for political as
well as economic ends. But, third, many of these disadvantaged post-
colonial states and their loyalist intellectuals have, in my opinion,
drawn the wrong set of conclusions, which in practise is that one must
either attempt to impose control upon the production of knowledge at
the source, or, in the worldwide media economy, to attempt to im-
prove, enhance, and ameliorate the images currently in circulation
without doing anything to change the political situation from which

they emanate and on which to a certain extent they are based.
The failings of these approaches strike me as obvious, and here I

don’t want to go into such matters as the squandering of immense
amounts of petro-dollars for various short-lived public relations scams,
or the increasing repression, human-rights abuses, outright gangster-

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Orientalism Reconsidered

ism that has taken place in many formerly colonial countries, all of
them occurring in the name of national security and fighting neo-
imperialism. What I do want to talk about is the much larger question
of what, in the context recently provided by such relatively small efforts
as the critique of Orientalism, is to be done, and on the level of politics
and criticism how we can speak of intellectual work that isn’t merely
reactive or negative.

I come finally now to the second and, in my opinion, the more

challenging and interesting set of problems that derive from the recon-
sideration of Orientalism. One of the legacies of Orientalism, and
indeed one of its epistemological foundations, is historicism, that is,
the view propounded by Vico, Hegel, Marx, Ranke, Dilthey, and
others, that if humankind has a history it is produced by men and
women, and can be understood historically as, at each given period,
epoch, or moment, possessing a complex, but coherent unity. So far as
Orientalism in particular and the European knowledge of other societies
in general have been concerned, historicism meant that the one human

history uniting humanity either culminated in or was observed from the
vantage point of Europe, or the West. What was neither observed by
Europe nor documented by it was therefore “lost” until, at some later
date, it too could be incorporated by the new sciences of anthropology,
political economics, and linguistics. It is out of this later recuperation, of
what Eric Wolf has called people without history, that a still later dis-

ciplinary step was taken, the founding of the science of world history,
whose major practitioners include Braudel, Wallerstein, Perry Ander-
son, and Wolf himself.

But along with the greater capacity for dealing with – in Ernst
Bloch’s phrase – the non-synchronous experiences of Europe’s Other
has gone a fairly uniform avoidance of the relationship between Euro-
pean imperialism and these variously constituted, variously formed
and articulated knowledges. What, in other words, has never taken

place is an epistemological critique at the most fundamental level of
the connection between the development of a historicism which has
expanded and developed enough to include antithetical attitudes such
as ideologies of Western imperialism and critiques of imperialism, on
the one hand, and, on the other, the actual practise of imperialism by
which the accumulation of territories and population, the control of
economies, and the incorporation and homogenization of histories
are maintained. If we keep this in mind we will remark, for example,

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102 Edward W. Said

that in the methodological assumptions and practise of world history
– which is ideologically anti-imperialist – little or no attention is
given to those cultural practises like Orientalism or ethnography af-
filiated with imperialism, which in genealogical fact fathered world
history itself; hence the emphasis in world history as a discipline has
been on economic and political practises, defined by the processes of
world historical writing, as in a sense separate and different from, as
well as unaffected by, the knowledge of them which world history pro-
duces. The curious result is that the theories of accumulation on a
world scale, or the captialist world state, or lineages of absolutism
depend (a) on the same displaced percipient and historicist observer
who had been an Orientalist or colonial traveler three generations ago;
(b) they depend also on a homogenizing and incorporating world
historical scheme that assimilated non-synchronous developments,
histories, cultures, and peoples to it; and (c) they block and keep down
latent epistemological critiques of the institutional, cultural, and dis-

ciplinary instruments linking the incorporative practise of world his-

tory with partial knowledges like Orientalism, on the one hand, and
with continued “Western” hegemony of the non-European, peripheral
world, on the other.

In fine, the problem is once again historicism and the universalizing
and self-validating that has been endemic to it. Bryan Turner’s excep-
tionally important little bookMarx and The End of Orientalism went a very
great part of the distance towards fragmenting, dissociating, dislocat-

ing, and decentering the experiential terrain covered at present by
universalizing historicism; what he suggests in discussing the epis-
temological dilemma is the need to go beyond the polarities and

binary oppositions of Marxist-historicist thought (voluntarisms vs.
determinism, Asiatic vs. Western society, change vs. stasis) in order to
create a new type of analysis of plural, as opposed to single, objects.
Similarly, in a whole series of studies produced in a number of both
interrelated and frequently unrelated fields, there has been a general
advance in the process of, as it were, breaking up, dissolving, and
methodologically as well as critically re-conceiving the unitary field
ruled hitherto by Orientalism, historicism, and what could be called
essentialist universalism.

I shall be giving examples of this dissolving and decentering process
in a moment. What needs to be said about it immediately is that it is
neither purely methodological nor purely reactive in intent. You do

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Orientalism Reconsidered

not respond, for example, to the tyrannical conjuncture of colonial
power with scholarly Orientalism simply by proposing an alliance be-
tween nativist sentiment buttressed by some variety of native ideology
to combat them. This, it seems to me, has been the trap into which
many Third World and anti-imperialist activists fell in supporting the
Iranian and Palestinian struggles, and who found themselves either
with nothing to say about the abominations of Khomeini’s regime or
resorting, in the Palestine case, to the time-worn cliches of revolution-
ism and, if I might coin a deliberately barbaric phrase, rejectionary
armed-strugglism after the Lebanese debacle. Nor can it be a matter
simply of re-cycling the old Marxist or world-historical rhetoric, which
only accomplishes the dubiously valuable task of re-establishing intel-
lectual and theoretical ascendancy of the old, by now impertinent and
genealogically flawed, conceptual models. No: we must, I believe,
think both in political and above all theoretical terms, locating the
main problems in what Frankfurt theory identified as domination and
division of labor, and along with those, the problem of the absence of a
theoretical and utopian as well as libertarian dimension in analysis. We
cannot proceed, therefore, unless we dissipate and re-dispose the
material of historicism into radically different objects and pursuits of
knowledge, and we cannot do that until we are aware clearly that no
new projects of knowledge can be constituted unless they fight to
remain free of the dominance and professionalized particularism that
come with historicist systems and reductive, pragmatic, or functional-
ist theories.

These goals are less grand and difficult than my description sounds.
For the reconsideration of Orientalism has been intimately connected
with many other activities of the sort I referred to earlier, and which it
now becomes imperative to articulate in more detail. Thus, for exam-
ple, we can now see that Orientalism is a praxis of the same sort, albeit
in different territories, as male gender dominance, or patriarchy, in
metropolitan societies: the Orient was routinely described as feminine,
its riches as fertile, its main symbols the sensual woman, the harem, and
and the despotic – but curiously attractive – ruler. Moreover, Orien-
tals like Victorian housewives were confined to silence and to un-
limited enriching production. Now much of this material is manifestly
connected to the configurations of sensual, racial, and political asym-
metry underlying mainstream modern Western culture, as adum-
brated and illuminated respectively by feminists, by black studies

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104 Edward W. Said

critics, and by anti-imperialist activists. To read, for example, Sandra
Gilbert’s recent and extraordinarily brilliant study of Rider Haggard’s
She is to perceive the narrow correspondence between suppressed Vic-
torian sexuality at home, its fantasies abroad, and the tightening hold
of imperialist ideology on the late 19th-century male imagination. Simi-
larly, a work like Abdul JanMohamed’s Manichean Aesthetics investigates
the parallel, but unremittingly separate artistic worlds of white and black
fictions of the same place, Africa, suggesting that even in imaginative
literature a rigid ideological system operates beneath a freer surface.
Or in a study like Peter Gran’s The Islamic Roots of Capitalism, which is
written out of a polemically although meticulously researched and
scrupulously concrete anti-imperialist and anti-Orientalist historical
stance, one can begin to sense what a vast invisible terrain of human
effort and ingenuity lurks beneath the frozen Orientalist surface for-
merly carpeted by the discourse of Islamic or Oriental economic
history.

There are many more examples that one could give of analyses and
theoretical projects undertaken out of similar impulses as those fuel-
ling the anti-Orientalist critique. All of them are interventionary in
nature, that is, they self-consciously situate themselves at vulnerable
conjunctural nodes of ongoing disciplinary discourses where each of
them posits nothing less than new objects of knowledge, new praxes of
humanist (in the broad sense of the word) activity, new theoretical
models that upset or at the very least radically alter the prevailing
paradigmatic norms. One might list here such disparate efforts as
Linda Nochlin’s explorations of 19th-century Orientalist ideology as
working within major art-historical contexts; Hanna Batatu’s im-
mense re-structuring of the terrain of the modern Arab state’s political
behavior; Raymond Williams’s sustained examinations of structures
of feeling, communities of knowledge, emergent or alternative cul-
tures, patterns of geographical thought (as in his remarkable The Coun-
try and The City); Talal Asad’s account of anthropological self-capture in
the work of major theorists, and along with that his own studies in the
field; Eric Hobsbawm’s new formulation of “the invention of tradi-
tion” or invented practises studied by historians as a crucial index both
of the historian’s craft and, more important, of the invention of new
emergent nations; the work produced in re-examination ofJapanese,
Indian, and Chinese culture by scholars like Masao Miyoshi, Eqbal
Ahmad, Tarik Ali, Romila Thapar, the group around Ranajit Guha

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Orientalism Reconsidered

(Subaltern Studies), Gayatri Spivak, and younger scholars like Homi
Bhabha and Partha Mitter; the freshly imaginative reconsideration by
Arab literary critics – the Fusoul and Mawakif groups, Elias Khouri,
Kamal Abu Deeb, Mohammad Bannis, and others – seeking to rede-
fine and invigorate the reified classical structures of Arabic literary per-
formance, and as a parallel to that, the imaginative works of Juan
Goytisolo and Salman Rushdie whose fictions and criticism are self-
consciously written against the cultural stereotypes and represen-
tations commanding the field. It is worth mentioning here too the
pioneering efforts of the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, and the fact
that twice recently, in their presidential addresses an American Sinologist
(Benjamin Schwartz) and Indologist (Ainslee Embree) have reflected
seriously upon what the critique of Orientalism means for their fields,
a public reflection as yet denied Middle Eastern scholars. Perenially,
there is the work carried out by Noam Chomsky in political and his-
torical fields, an example of independent radicalism and uncom-
promising severity unequalled by anyone else today. Or in literary
theory, there are the powerful theoretical articulations of a social, in
the widest and deepest sense, model for narrative put forward by Fred-
ricJameson; Richard Ohmann’s empirically arrived-at definitions of
canon privilege and institution in his recent work; revisionary Emer-
sonian perspectives formulated in the critique of contemporary tech-
nological and imaginative, as well as cultural ideologies by Richard
Poirier; the decentering, redistributive ratios of intensity and drive
studied by Leo Bersani.

One could go on mentioning many more, but I certainly do not wish
to suggest that by excluding particular examples I have thought them
less eminent or less worth attention. What I want to do in conclusion is
to try to draw them together into a common endeavor which, it has
seemed to me, can inform the larger enterprise of which the critique of
Orientalism is a part. First, we note a plurality of audiences and con-
stituencies; none of the works and workers I have cited claims to be
working on behalf of One audience which is the only one that counts,
or for one supervening, overcoming Truth, a truth allied to Western (or
for that matter Eastern) reason, objectivity, science. On the contrary,
we note here a plurality of terrains, multiple experiences, and different
constituencies, each with its admitted (as opposed to denied) interest,
political desiderata, disciplinary goals. All these efforts work out of
what might be called a decentered consciousness, not less reflective

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106 Edward W. Said

and critical for being decentered, for the most part non- and in some
cases anti-totalizing and anti-systematic. The result is that instead of
seeking common unity by appeals to a center of sovereign authority,
methodological consistency, canonicity, and science, they offer the
possibility of common grounds of assembly between them. They are
therefore planes of activity and praxis, rather than one topography
commanded by a geographical and historical vision locatable in a
known center of metropolitan power. Second, these activities and

praxes are consciously secular, marginal, and oppositional with reference
to the mainstream, generally authoritarian systems from which they
emanate, and against which they now agitate. Thirdly, they are political
and practical in as much as they intend – without necessarily succeed-
ing in implementing – the end of dominating, coercive systems of
knowledge. I do not think it too much to say that the political meaning
of analysis, as carried out in all these fields, is uniformly and program-
matically libertarian by virtue of the fact that, unlike Orientalism, it is
not based on the finality and closure of antiquarian or curatorial

knowledge, but on investigative open models of analysis, even though
it might seem that analyses of this sort – frequently difficult and
abstruse – are in the final count paradoxically qtiietistic. I think we
must remember the lesson provided by Adorno’s negative dialectics,
and regard analysis as in the fullest sense being against the grain,
deconstructive, utopian.

But there remains the one problem haunting all intense, self-convicted,
and local intellectual work, the problem of the division of labor, which
is a necessary consequence of that reification and commodification
first and most powerfully analysed in this century by Georg Lukacs.
This is the problem sensitively and intelligently put by MyraJehlen for
women’s studies: whether in identifying and working through anti-
dominant critiques, subaltern groups – women, blacks, and so on

–

can resolve the dilemma of autonomous fields of experience and
knowledge that are created as a consequence. A double kind of posses-
sive exclusivism could set in: the sense of being an excluding insider by
virtue of experience (only women can write for and about women, and

only literature that treats women or Orientals well is good literature),
and second, being an excluding insider by virtue of method (only
Marxists, anti-Orientalists, feminists can write about economics, Ori-
entalism, women’s literature).

This is where we are now, at the threshold of fragmentation and

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Orientalism Reconsidered

specialization, which impose their own parochial dominations and
fussy defensiveness, or on the verge of some grand synthesis which I
for one believe could very easily wipe out both the gains and the
oppositional consciousness provided hitherto by these counter-
knowledges. Several possibilities propose themselves, and I shall con-
clude simply by listing them. A need for greater crossing of bound-
aries, for greater interventionism in cross-disciplinary activity, a con-
centrated awareness of the situation – political, methodological, social,
historical – in which intellectual and cultural work is carried out. A
clarified political and methodological commitment to the dismantling
of systems of domination which since they are collectively maintained
must, to adopt and transform some of Gramsci’s phrases, be collec-
tively fought, by mutual siege, war of maneuver and war of position.
Lastly, a much sharpened sense of the intellectual’s role both in the
defining of a context and in changing it, for without that, I believe, the
critique of Orientalism is simply an ephemeral pastime.

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• Article Contents

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• Issue Table of Contents

Cultural Critique, No. 1 (Autumn, 1985), pp. 1-216
Front Matter [pp. 1 – 182]
Prospectus [pp. 5 – 6]
The Apollonian Investment of Modern Humanist Education: The Examples of Matthew Arnold, Irving Babbitt, and I. A. Richards [pp. 7 – 72]
Is the Subject of Science Sexed? [pp. 73 – 88]
Orientalism Reconsidered [pp. 89 – 107]
The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual [pp. 109 – 124]
Right and Violence: A German Trauma [pp. 125 – 139]
Michelet’s Narrative Practice: Naturality, Populism, and the Intellectual [pp. 141 – 158]
Generic Transformation and Social Change: Rethinking the Rise of the Novel [pp. 159 – 181]
Review Article
Verso & Recto: An Essay on “Criticism and Social Change” [pp. 183 – 215]
Back Matter [pp. 216 – 216]