Thinking activity about Orientalism

Thinking Activity: 5 Concepts related to Orientalism on the basis of the following video

Interview of Edward said on Orientalism

"Orientalism revolutionised  the study of the Middle East and helped to create and shaped entire new fields of study"

Five main concepts about Orientalism:-

1. Organized form of writing

Whenever someone wish to know about the countries which are far away from their places, they must rely on some sort of writings. This was not usual writing, but it would be organized form of writing. But in reality we couldn't rely on all such literature. We don't know who has travelled that places, and who has not, who is giving real picture and who is giving fake. In other words we didn't get what we call realistic representations of Orient, either in literature, or in painting, or in music, or in any form of the art.

"And this extended even further into descriptions of the Arabs by experts, people who had studied them. I noticed that even in the twentieth century some of the same images that you found in the nineteenth century amongst scholars like Edward William Lane who wrote his book on the Modern Egyptians in the early 1830's and then you read somebody in the 1920's and they more or less saying the same thing."

2. Timeless Orient

 In a way all orientals are same, no matter from which country it belongs, whether it is India, or any other nation, it's basically the same assets, So there develops a kind of image of Timeless orient.


3. Islamic Tag

Iranian revolution describes itself as Islamic revolution. Many people around the world considered all Islamic people as terrorist. This is wrong mindset of people. Only few are destroying the whole world, but many innocents are getting blame because of that Islamic tag. Media is responsible for giving tag. Edward said wrote "Covering Islam" regarding this topic.

"So the impression you got of Islam was that it was a frightening mysterious, above all threatening, as if the main business of Muslims was to threaten and try to kill Americans. As recently as last year, 1996, that is almost sixteen or seventeen years after I wrote Covering Islam, I did an update of the book, and I wrote a new introduction"

4.  Idea about discourse

Edward said:-

 "Discourse is a regulated system of producing knowledge within certain constraints whereby certain rules have to be observed"

For eg, Arab country doesn't try to change its picture across the world. Arabians are living in same discourse from very ancient times.

" Arabs have participated and continue to allow themselves to be represented as Orientals in this Orientalist way. There is no, for example, information policy of the twenty Arab countries, twenty-two Arab countries, to try to give a different picture of what their worlds are like. Because most of them are dictatorships. All of them are dictatorships without democracy, who are in desperate need of U.S. patronage, government patronage, to support them, so they are not about to criticize the United States."

 5. Idea of history

Every nation has its own history, the way we interpreted the history is quite different. History is not only about to understand our one's self, but to understand our self in terms or in relation with nation.

Eg- Palestinian's local complexities, mixed background of Arab Muslims, Arab and Jews, Arab Christian, Israeli Jews.

 "History some shape and sense, for a particular reason, not just to show that my history is better than yours, or my history is worse than yours. I'm a victim and you're somebody who's oppressed people or so on, but rather, to understand my history in terms of other people's history, in other words to try to understand, to move beyond, to generalize one's own individual experience to the experience of others."

In films, or in any popular culture, everything exotic is termed as Orientalism, whether it is about dress or wealth