Orientalism (62 page)

I think it would be wrong to suggest that in much of the best post-colonial work that has proliferated so dramatically since the early 1980s there hasn’t been a great emphasis on the local, regional, and contingent: there has, but it seems to me to be most interestingly connected in its general approach to a universal set of concerns, all of them having to do with emancipation, revisionist attitudes toward history and culture, and a widespread use of recurring theoretical models and styles. A leading motif has been the consistent critique of Eurocentrism and patriarchy. Across U.S. and European campuses in the 1980s students and faculty alike worked assiduously to expand the academic focus of so-called core curricula to include writing by women, non-European artists and thinkers, and subalterns. This was accompanied by important changes in the approach to area studies, long in the hands of classical Orientalists and their equivalents. Anthropology, political science, literature, sociology, and above all history felt the effects of a wide-ranging critique of sources, the introduction of theory, and the dislodgement of the Eurocentric perspective. Perhaps the most brilliant revisionist work was done not in Middle East Studies, but in the field of Indology with the advent of Subaltern Studies, a group of remarkable scholars and researchers led by Ranajit Guha. Their aim was nothing less than a revolution in historiography, their immediate goal being to rescue the writing of Indian history from the domination of the nationalist elite and restore to it the important role of the urban poor and the rural masses. I think it would be wrong to say of such mostly academic work only that it was easily co-optable and complicit with “transnational” neo-colonialism. We need to record and acknowledge the achievement while warning of the later pitfalls.

What has been of special interest for me has been the extension of post-colonial concerns to the problems of geography. After all,
Orientalism
is a study based on the re-thinking of what had for centuries been believed to be an unbridgeable chasm separating East from West. My aim, as I said earlier, was not so much to dissipate difference itself—for who can deny the constitutive role of national as well as cultural differences in the relations between human beings—but to challenge the notion that difference implies hostility, a frozen reified set of opposed essences, and a whole adversarial knowledge built out of those things. What I called for in
Orientalism
was a new way of conceiving the separations and conflicts that had stimulated generations of hostility, war, and imperial control. And indeed, one of the most interesting developments in post-colonial studies was a re-reading
of the canonical cultural works, not to demote or somehow dish dirt on them, but to re-investigate some of their assumptions, going beyond the stifling hold on them of some version of the master-slave binary dialectic. This has certainly been the comparable effect of astoundingly resourceful novels such as Rusdie’s
Midnight’s Children
, the narratives of C. L. R. James, the poetry of Aimé Césaire and of Derek Walcott, works whose daring new formal achievements are in effect a re-appropriation of the historical experience of colonialism, revitalized and transformed into a new aesthetic of sharing and often transcendent re-formulation.

One sees it also in the work of the group of distinguished Irish writers who in 1980 established themselves as a collective called Field Day. The preface to a collection of their works says about them:

The idea of rethinking and re-formulating historical experiences which had once been based on the geographical separation of peoples and cultures is at the heart of a whole spate of scholarly and critical works. It is to be found, to mention only three, in Ammiel Alcalay’s
After Arabs and Jews: Remaking Levantine Culture
, Paul Gilroy’s
The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness
, and Moira Ferguson’s
Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery
,
1670–1834
.
¹¹
In these works, domains once believed to have been exclusive to one people, gender, race, or class are re-examined and shown to have involved others. For long represented as a battleground between Arabs and Jews, the Levant emerges in Alcalay’s book as a Mediterranean culture common to both peoples; according to Gilroy a similar process alters, indeed doubles, our perception of the Atlantic Ocean, hitherto thought of as principally a European
passage. And in re-examining the adversarial relationship between English slave-owners and African slaves, Ferguson allows a more complex pattern dividing white female from white male to stand out, with new demotions and dislocations appearing as a result in Africa.

I could go on giving more and more examples. I shall conclude briefly by saying that although the animosities and inequities still exist from which my interest in Orientalism as a cultural and political phenomenon began, there is now at least a general acceptance that these represent not an eternal order but a historical experience whose end, or at least partial abatement, may be at hand. Looking back at it from the distance afforded by fifteen eventful years and the availability of a massive new interpretive and scholarly enterprise to reduce the effects of imperialist shackles on thought and human relations,
Orientalism
at least had the merit of enlisting itself openly in the struggle, which continues of course in “West” and “East” together.

E. W. S.

New York
March 1994

1
.
Thierry Desjardins,
Le Martyre du Liban
(Paris: Plon, 1976), p. 14.

2
.
K. M. Panikkar,
Asia and Western Dominance
(London: George Allen & Unwin, 1959).

3
.
Denys Hay,
Europe: The Emergence of an Idea
, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1968).

4
.
Steven Marcus,
The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth Century England
(1966; reprint ed., New York: Bantam Books, 1967), pp. 200–19.

5
.
See my
Criticism Between Culture and System
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, forthcoming).

6
.
Principally in his
American Power and the New Mandarins: Historical and Political Essays
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1969) and
For Reasons of State
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1973).

7
.
Walter Benjamin,
Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism
, trans. Harry Zohn (London: New Left Books, 1973), p. 71.

8
.
Harry Bracken, “Essence, Accident and Race,”
Hermathena
116 (Winter 1973): 81–96.

9
.
In an interview published in
Diacritics
6, no. 3 (Fall 1976): 38.

10
.
Raymond Williams,
The Long Revolution
(London: Chatto & Windus, 1961), pp. 66–7.

11
.
In my
Beginnings: Intention and Method
(New York: Basic Books, 1975).

12
.
Louis Althusser,
For Marx
, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969), pp. 65–7.

13
.
Raymond Schwab,
La Renaissance orientale
(Paris: Payot, 1950); Johann W. Fück,
Die Arabischen Studien in Europa bis in den Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts
(Leipzig: Otto Harrassowitz, 1955); Dorothee Metlitzki,
The Matter of Araby in Medieval England
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977).

14
.
E. S. Shaffer, “
Kubla Khan” and The Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature, 1770–1880
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).

15
.
George Eliot,
Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life
(1872; reprint ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1956), p. 164.

16
.
Antonio Gramsci,
The Prison Notebooks: Selections
, trans. and ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971),
p. 324. The full passage, unavailable in the Hoare and Smith translation, is to be found in Gramsci,
Quaderni del Carcere
, ed. Valentino Gerratana (Turin: Einaudi Editore, 1975), 2: 1363.

17
.
Raymond Williams,
Culture and Society, 1780–1950
(London: Chatto & Windus, 1958), p. 376.

1
.
This and the preceding quotations from Arthur James Balfour’s speech to the House of Commons are from Great Britain,
Parliamentary Debates
(Commons), 5th ser., 17 (1910): 1140–46. See also A. P. Thornton,
The Imperial Idea and Its Enemies: A Study in British Power
(London: MacMillan & Co., 1959), pp. 357–60. Balfour’s speech was a defense of Eldon Gorst’s policy in Egypt; for a discussion of that see Peter John Dreyfus Mellini, “Sir Eldon Gorst and British Imperial Policy in Egypt,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1971.

2
.
Denis Judd,
Balfour and the British Empire: A Study in Imperial Evolution, 1874–1932
(London: MacMillan & Co., 1968), p. 286. See also p. 292: as late as 1926 Balfour spoke—without irony—of Egypt as an “independent nation.”

3
.
Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer,
Political and Literary Essays
,
1908–1913
(1913; reprint ed., Freeport, N. Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1969), pp. 40, 53, 12–14.

4
.
Ibid., p. 171.

5
.
Roger Owen, “The Influence of Lord Cromer’s Indian Experience on British Policy in Egypt 1883–1907,” in
Middle Eastern Affairs, Number Four: St. Antony’s Papers Number 17
, ed. Albert Hourani (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 109–39.

6
.
Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer,
Modern Egypt
(New York: Macmillan Co., 1908), 2: 146–67. For a British view of British policy in Egypt that runs totally counter to Cromer’s, see Wilfrid Scawen Blunt,
Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt: Being a Personal Narrative of Events
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922). There is a valuable discussion of Egyptian opposition to British rule in Mounah A. Khouri,
Poetry and the Making of Modern Egypt, 1882–1922
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1971).

7
.
Cromer,
Modern Egypt
, 2: 164.

8
.
Cited in John Marlowe,
Cromer in Egypt
(London: Elek Books, 1970), p. 271.

9
.
Harry Magdoff, “Colonialism (1763–c. 1970),”
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, 15th ed. (1974), pp. 893–4. See also D. K. Fieldhouse,
The Colonial Empires: A Comparative Survey from the Eighteenth Century
(New York: Delacorte Press, 1967), p. 178.

10
.
Quoted in Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid,
Egypt and Cromer: A Study in Anglo-Egyptian Relations
(New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1969), p. 3.

11
.
The phrase is to be found in Ian Hacking,
The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas About Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference
(London: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 17.

12
.
V. G. Kiernan,
The Lords of Human Kind: Black Man, Yellow Man, and White Man in an Age of Empire
(Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1969), p. 55.

13
.
Edgar Quinet,
Le Génie des religions, in Oeuvres complètes
(Paris: Paguerre, 1857), pp. 55–74.

14
.
Cromer,
Political and Literary Essays
, p. 35.

15
.
See Jonah Raskin,
The Mythology of Imperialism
(New York: Random House, 1971), p. 40.

16
.
Henry A. Kissinger,
American Foreign Policy
(New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1974), pp. 48–9.

17
.
Harold W. Glidden, “The Arab World,”
American Journal of Psychiatry
128, no. 8 (February 1972): 984–8.

18
.
R. W. Southern,
Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 72. See also Francis Dvornik,
The Ecumenical Councils
(New York: Hawthorn Books, 1961), pp. 65–6: “Of special interest is the eleventh canon directing that chairs for teaching Hebrew, Greek, Arabic and Chaldean should be created at the main universities. The suggestion was Raymond Lull’s, who advocated learning Arabic as the best means for the conversion of the Arabs. Although the canon remained almost without effect as there were few teachers of Oriental languages, its acceptance indicates the growth of the missionary idea in the West. Gregory X had already hoped for the conversion of the Mongols, and Franciscan friars had penetrated into the depths of Asia in their missionary zeal. Although these hopes were not fulfilled, the missionary spirit continued to develop.” See also Johann W. Fück,
Die Arabischen Studien in Europa bis in den Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts
(Leipzig: Otto Harrassowitz, 1955).