really really interesting and probably my fave week for history of art this semester but anything academic just hurts my brain. also bonus that i had to read it for english lit but i have already read it.

Une lecture essentielle pour tout le monde, qui que vous soyez. La postface écrite par Edward Said 16 ans après la publication de son essai est très intéressante et enrichissante puisqu'il y revient sur les critiques et diverses interprétations faites de son texte aux quatre coins du monde et nous rappelle ce que son texte N'EST PAS, mais l'expérience démontre qu'il est très difficile de ne pas y voir ce que chacun espère ou redoute... La citation choisie par Edward Said au début de son essai prend tout son sens "Ils ne peuvent se représenter eux-mêmes ; ils doivent être représentés." Karl Marx.

There is not much to say about this book, apart from the fact that Said's view of the west holds up still today. I feel like I would have gotten more out of this book if I had studied it with a guide, or at least chececked every Orientalist he mentioned to get a full grasp of his point of view, but even just by reading it (in the span of three years, and for some reason always in hazy July afternoons while I was about to fall asleep) I still feel I understood his main points.

One fault I found in it, though, is that the chapters are way too long for a book of over four hundred pages, I felt like I could never take a break lest I miss the point he was trying to make in each sub-chapter.

Other than that it's a classic for a reason, definitely worth the time it took to finish it.

Musste erstmal die Rocky Theme Musik spielen- kann nicht glauben, dass ich es geschafft habe dieses MASSIVES Buch zu Ende zu lesen, wow

read for a paper i’m writing.

have encountered many excerpts and ideas from this book in the last few years, but this was my first time reading it in full. a lot of Said’s arguments have, since 1978, become a fundamental part of academic discourses about how “the West” represents “the East.”

and yet, reading the “Orientalism Now” section of this book, i was acutely aware of its relevance to the current moment, not just the moment in which it was written. i did a lot of thinking about how Orientalist imaginations of “the East” have persisted in modern academic and popular culture.

this book was effective as both theory/criticism and as a really comprehensive history of British, French, and US Orientalism — as an assertion of cultural power, as an instrument of empire and conquest, as a political and economic tool into the present. it was so useful to see, side by side, the evolution of Orientalism as an intellectual discipline in the West alongside the evolution of how this discipline was being used to assert Western dominance elsewhere.

there’s not really anything i can say about Said’s work that it can’t say for itself, so i don’t feel inclined to write a longer review than this one. very glad i read this though.

(ps i read a 1979 edition that my dad bought used (and annotated heavily) for his undergrad thesis, so my copy of this book has been on some adventures in the past 45 years. which is kind of neat)

Понеже си минах изпита, е време да кажа и нещо за книгата.

Идеите за Ориента са много. Няма само една, защото гледната точка на всеки е индивидуална. Дори разказите по реални събития не могат да дадат точен отговор, те само създават действителност.
Още в блога: https://knigoqdec.blogspot.com/2019/0...

A Seminal Work for Cultural Understanding

Relations between people of different cultures is a vital part of today’s world, not only for culture’s sake, but in terms of diplomacy, business, travel, military action, and even just general knowledge for daily life. Unlike in previous eras, we are extremely likely to find ourselves living and working with those “others” who used to inhabit unknown spaces “out there”. Governments have to deal intimately with foreigners in a variety of ways. So, intercultural relations can impact on our daily life in new ways that our grandparents never dreamt of. The quality and success of those relationships are going to depend on what we know as individuals about those “others” or on what we know as a society. That is why the process by which we get that knowledge and the actual contents of that knowledge are so important. ORIENTALISM is the work that over the last 40 years has most influenced the way people think and write about that process.

Edward Said concentrated on what is commonly known as “the Middle East”, but would be better known as the largely-Muslim countries east of Europe and west of India, or maybe “western Asia”. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, this part of the world was often called “the Orient”. (Though people often applied that term to the rest of Asia too.) The method in which he looks at this so-called Orient can be extended to any other area. He examines the process by which Euro-Americans sought information about the Orient. They gleaned it from the writings of diplomats, soldiers, colonial administrators, travelers, and businessmen who had stayed for varying lengths of time in the Orient. They got it from the paintings of artists who wished to sell paintings of exotic scenes or from poets and novelists who wished to write of exotic locales. In almost all cases, the presenters of knowledge treated the Orient as homogenous, simple, dangerous, crude, full of exoticism or fanaticism and above all, unchanging. People there were not separate individuals like “us”; they were the undifferentiated “others” with whom we could make contrasts favorable to ourselves. Some Westerners might dream of escape to the exotic world of the Orient, where society would be the reverse of their own. Some presenters of the Orient knew a lot about what they wrote or painted, others had an extremely superficial knowledge. In all cases, Said writes, the information collected and presented was used by governments in the West to control the Orient. Information was power. The people in the so-called Orient had, and needed, no independent existence. They were only shadows brought to life by the Light of Knowledge emanating from the West. They might be guided to proper ways by Western powers, Westerners with power. Orientalism underlay colonialism.

Said examines the vast body of written work—that “Orientalism”—very extensively. He notes that it has had its own paradigms of research, its own learned societies, its own establishment, not to mention university departments labelled “Oriental Studies” in many countries. Through such bodies, the Orient has been labelled, packaged, and presented to the world for two hundred years. We can see this process alive and well today. All you have to do is watch Hollywood movies, turn on your TV for the news, or read travel/geographic magazines. All you have to do is listen to current American pronouncements about the same area, regard their lack of trust in its people, their lack of respect. Think about the labels that are put on Palestinians or Iranians. It is not a question of whether you support this particular cause or that. It is a question of how you get your information. Think about it. The world may depend on a radical change in Western thinking, equal to a stop to suicide bombings, teaching of hatred in schools, and terrorist plots. When is a man a terrorist and when is he a freedom fighter? When an international news magazine tells us so? An information establishment shapes the presentation of that old “Orient” and many other parts of the world. Said took the first mighty step in forcing the West to see its own constructions. For that, and for a detailed, well-argued book, five stars are obligatory.

P.S. I wrote this review 15 years ago. Do you think a lot has changed?

The book demonstrates how Foucault’s discourse theory can be applied to colonial themes. You can’t unread it. Of course, the Islamic world, and the so-called East in general, may have its own rigid discourse about the so-called West. For literary or social theory, the book is also remarkably well-written.

“From 1815 to 1914 European direct colonial dominion expanded from about 35% of the earth’s surface to about 85% of it. Every continent was affected, none more so than Africa and Asia. The two greatest empires were the British and the French; allies and partners in some things, in others they were hostile rivals.”

Without doubt this is a dated and dry account which has the stilted style you would more commonly associate with scholars and historians of a bygone era, which I suppose in some ways is now where Said could be placed. I have to say I agree with almost everything Said says, but the major problem with this, and it is a critical one, is that the writing is terrible. I mean this is the kind of prose which put youngsters off history when they get subjected to it at a young age.

Another huge failing is with the unbearably, long winded quotes in untranslated French, 14 lines long and longer, with no English translation. Crazy me (hits head with hand) I never saw this was a French edition…no wait a minute…it’s English?...

So this is yet another example of an elite, snobby academic writing for other elite, snobby academics and falling into that cliché pitfall of assuming that anything in French is somehow automatically culturally superior. Why do these people never do the same with the German language?...

I simply cannot fathom the logic a Palestinian who writes a book complaining about elitist, ignorant and superior attitudes of the West, and then repeatedly resorts to elitist, ignorant and superior tactics himself?... Of course he makes a number of incredibly valid points, but unfortunately his delivery is just so dull and flat that it is hard to care and this is a good example of how not write a historical/political account.

The way this book was explaining the prevalence ond logic of Islamophobia I had to check the date, expecting it to be a very current book. Frightening that although it was written in the 70s the sort of racism and terror-mongering described in it is if anything more wide-spread than ever. This book very eloquently shows how orientalism works- it makes no parallels to things like the male/female binary (who speaks, who describes whom, who is exoticised as "other", less and deficit) but to me reading as a feminist that parallel definitely exists which made Said's argument very understandable (even though he has read so many impenetrable writings and quoted some of them in French...not always with a translation).

As an Australian who is interested in post-colonial thinking, I also found that Said's analysis (though localised) made sense in terms of the way Indigenous cultures have been "known" and "owned" by us as a colonised/colonising nation. This, then must be the source of why we were told in critical Indigenous pedagogy class to avoid pronouns such as "us" and "them". Said admits there are no easy answers but show the danger of blythely following thinking without asking the questions. So much of the last few pages was quotable!

A difficult read, very difficult but very worthwhile and I suspect it has been influential (though not yet enough).

An immensely important work. It changed the way we think and showed us how to decipher the language of dominant cultures.

الاستشراق ليس تخصصا أكاديميا بحتا وهو ليس مجموعة من الباحثين المتحيزين أو بضعة من الرحالة المتنقلين بين بلاد المشرق

بل هو جهاز ثقافي يتكون من معدات ونشاطات ومؤسسات لإصدار أحكام وفرض مجموعة من الأقوال كانها حقائق ومحاولة إعادة خلق وعي جديد بالمشرق على أساس أن المشرقي لا يستطيع تمثيل نفسه وشرح ذاته لأنه قاصر عن ذلك

مجموعة من عمليات الإزاحة والتبديل للوعي الحقيقي السابق إلى وعي غربي بالمشرق ليستطيع المشرقي تمثيل نفسه
إذا بالملخص هي عملية إعادة تكوين وتمثيل

الاستشراق تحول من مرحلة الدراسة الأكاديمية إلى مرحلة الاستعانة به كأداة استعمارية في الواقع العملي

وتتمثل دراسة الراحل إدوارد بتحليل أسلوب الخطاب الغربي الاستشراقي الأدبي والمعرفي وعلاقتها بالمؤسسات العسكرية والسياسية الغربية من خلال كتابتهم وابحاثهم الاكاديمية

الخطاب الاستشراقي تميز بالتكرار والاعادة لاطروحة ان الشرق قاصر عن تمثيل نفسه وفهم ذاته وعلى الغربي ان يقود المشرقي الى الوعي بذاته وتمدينه بطريقة تصلح للعييش في عالمنا المعاصر

ماركس اكذ ذلك في قوله
انهم لا يستطيعون تمثيل انفسهك علينا تمثيلهم

هذه الجهود كله كانت مقدمة لنسق استعماري مستمر

بشكل عام الكتاب صعب ومرهق لكنه بالنهاية مفيد

ويحتاج إلى إعادة ترجمة لتوصيل النص بطريقة الطف
على امل قراءة الكتاب بنسخته الانجليزية