Edward Said

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On a visit to Beirut during the terrible civil war of 1975�1976 a French journalist wrote regretfully of the gutted downtown acea that "it had once seemed to belong to ... the Orient of Chateau-briand and Nerval."l He was right about the place, of course, especially so far as a European was concerned.

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The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, re-markable experiences.

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Now it was disappearing; in a sense it had happened, its time was over. Perhaps it seemed irrelevant that Orientals themselves had something at stake in the process, that even in the time of Chateaubriand and Nerval Orientals had lived there, and that now it was they who were suffering;

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the main thing for the European visitor was a European representation of the Orient and its contemporary fate, both of which had a privileged communal significance for the journalist and his French readers.

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Americans will not feel quite the same about the Orient, which for them is much more likely to be associated very differently with the Far East (China and Japan. mainly).

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Unlike the Americans, the French and the British-less so the Germans. Russians, Spanish, Portuguese, Italians, and Swiss-have had a long tradition of what I shall be calling Orienta/ism. a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient's special place in European Western experience.

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The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe's greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other. In addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West)

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as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. Yet none of this Orient is merely imaginative.

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The Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture. Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles.

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In contrast, the American understanding of the Orient will seem considerably less dense, although our recent Japanese, Korean, and Indochinese adventures ought now to be creating a more sober, more realistic "Oriental" awareness.

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Moreover, the vastly expanded American political and economic role in the Near East (the Middle East) makes great claims on our understanding of that Orient.

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It will be clear to the reader (and will become clearer still throughout the many pages that follow) that by Orientalism I mean several things, all of them, in my opinion, interdependent.

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The most readily accepted designation for Orientalism is an academic one, and indeed the label still serves in a number of academic institutions. Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient-and this applies whether the person is an anthropologist, sociologist, historian, or philologist--either in its specific or its general aspects, is an Orientalist, and what he or she does is Orientalism.

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Compared with Oriental studies or area studies, it is true that the term Orientalism is less preferred by specialists today, both because it is too vague and general and because it connotes the high-handed executive attitude of nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century European colonialism. Nevertheless books are written and congresses held with "the Orienf' as their main focus, with the Orientalist in his new or old guise as their main authority.

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The point is that even if it does not survive as it once did, Orien-talism lives on academically through its doctrines and theses about the Orient and the Oriental.

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Related to this academic tradition, whose fortunes, transmigra- tions, specializations, and transmissions are in part the subject of this study, is a more general meaning for Orientalism. Orientalism I i a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological .t-' distinction made between "the Orient" and (most of the time) "the Occident."

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"the Occident." Thus a very large mass of writers, among whom are poets, novelists, philosophers. political theorists, economists, and im- perial administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social, descriptions, and political accounts concerning the

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Orient, its people, customs, "mind," destiny, and so on. This Orien- talism can accommodate Aeschylus, say, and Victor Hugo, Dante and Karl Marx. A liule later in this introduction I shaH deal with the methodological problems one encounters in so broadly COR- strued a "field" as this.

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The interchange between the academic and the more or less imaginative meanings of Orientalism is a constant one, and since the late eighteenth century there has been a considerable, quite disciplined�perhaps even regulated-traffic between the two.

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Here I come to the third meaning of Oriental ism, which is something more historically and materially defined than either of the other two. Taking the late eighteenth century as a very roughly defined starting point Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the

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corporate institution for dealing with the Orient-dealing with it by making statements about it. authorizing views of it. describing ./ it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short. Oriental ism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having au- thority over the Orient.

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I have found it useful here to employ Michel Foucault's notion of a discourse, as described by him in The Archaeology of Knowledge and in Discipline and Punish, to identify Oriental ism. My contention is that without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enonnously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage-and even produce-the Orient politically, socio- logically, militarily, ideologically. scientifically.

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and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period. Moreover, so authoritative a position did Orientalism have that I believe no one writing, think- ing. or acting on the Orient could do so without taking account of the limitations on thought and action imposed by Orientalism. In brief, because of Oriental ism the Orient was not (and is not) a ' free subject of thought or action.

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This is not to say that Orientalism v' unilaterally detennines what can be said about the Orient, but that it is the whole network of interests inevitably brought to bear on (and therefore always involved in) any occasion when that peculiar entity "the Orient" is in question. How this happens is what this book tries to demonstrate.

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It also tries to show that European culture gained in strength and identity by sitting it self off againstthe Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self.

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Historically and culturally there is a quantitative as well as a qualitative difference between the Franco-British involvement in the Orient and-until the period of American aScendancy after

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World War II-the involvement of every other European and At- lantic power.