Edward Said Orientalism
Prof. Ramirez

According to Said, nineteenth-century Western scholars, in their translations of Eastern texts and later in their scholarship about the East, constructed, rather than described objectively, a vision of the Orient and of the Oriental based on series of ideological biases, prejudices that depicted the Orient as the opposite of the sophisticated West, the Oriental as the opposite of the virile, colonizing Westerner.  As such an ideological framework, Orientalism perpetuates a discourse of dichotomies that describe the West’s relationship to the East: superior/inferior, masculine/feminine, colonizer/colonized. 

Linguist Ernest Renan, novelist Gustave Flaubert, and emperor-trafficker in the exotic, Napoleon I are, according to Said, key figures in fixing the Orientalist perspective.  He also examines in some depth British traveler-scholars Edward Lane, Sir Richard Burton, and Sir Hamilton Gibb, arguing that such figures contributed to the making of the Orient first as an attempt to concretize Western countries a colonial powers in the area.  Because, according to Said’s analysis, the West can only successfully colonize the Orient by knowing it.  Thus, Orientalism—the West’s construction of the Orient as inherently and necessarily other, the foreign object to be studied and then dominated—can be understood as constituting a body of knowledge.  In knowing “the other,” and in being in the position to establish this knowledge as truth, the West yields power over those defined as other.  Said’s readings thus reinforce the Foucaultian move from knowledge to power, especially in Said’s interpretation of the rhetoric of English colonial administrators (Lord Evelyn Cromer and Arthur James Balfour).

Said writes,
"Knowledge of the Orient, because generated out of strength, in a sense creates the Orient, the Oriental, and his world.  In Cromer and Balfour’s language the Oriental is depicted as something one judges (as in a court of law), something one studies and depicts (as in a curriculum), something one disciplines (as in a school or prison), something one illustrates (as in a zoological manual).  The point is that in each of these cases the Oriental is contained and represented by dominating frameworks. "(Orientalism 40)


This orientalist impulse can be seen a wide variety of texts, including Johnson's Rasselas.