Social Theory: Edward Saïd

12th Oct 2022 by Ruba Ali Al-Hassani

In order to wage our struggle [“against the whole system of confinement, dispossession, exploitation and oppression that still holds us down”], we must first feel our chains, then we must understand them, then we must break them. And we must not allow ourselves to be bound again, least of all by chains of our own making (E. Saïd, 1977)125-6, 129-30, [emphasis added]).

As one of the most influential thinkers on anti-colonialism, Edward Saïd is the kind of intellectual who not only challenges a dominating system of knowledge, but also leaves his readers in existential reflection, inviting them to contemplate not only how Orientalizing systems affect them, but also their personal positionality in their research. As one of the first anti- and post-colonialist theorists, Saïd remains as relevant as ever during today’s decolonization movements.

Intellectual Context

Arguably one of the most influential thinkers in the humanities and known mostly for his works, Orientalism (1978)and Culture and Imperialism (1993), Edward William Wadie Saïd was born on 01 November 1935 in Jerusalem and spent his childhood between the two then-British colonies of Palestine and Egypt. His schooling, whether in Jerusalem or Cairo, was in Western-styled institutions. At the age of 15, his parents sent him to the United States to continue his education in Massachusetts. He went on to graduate from Princeton and Harvard, then taught English & Comparative Literature. Despite an apolitical youth, Saïd expressed later in life that he did not feel like he belonged anywhere particular. He longed for Palestine and took up its cause during his adulthood, especially as the 1967 war triggered his explorations of exile and dislocation. Geographically and socially, he was out of place, as he titled his autobiography. His early years determined the course of his career, as his scholarship reveals a personal dimension which he found crucial to integrate. This was important to him as an interdisciplinary scholar, which he effectively was, for he was heavily influenced not only by novelists and playwrights like Joseph Conrad (who was the subject of Saïd’s doctoral dissertation and first book) and Jean-Paul Sartre, but also by the works of sociologists like Michel Foucault and Theodor Adorno, psychiatrists and anti-colonialists like Fanon, and political philosophers like Antonio Gramsci. 

In Orientalism (1978), Saïd outlines three aspects of his ‘contemporary reality’ that shaped the course of his research and writing, one of which was the personal dimension. This was inspired by Gramsci, who had written on the importance self-consciousness and compiling an ‘inventory’ of personal history as the starting point of critical elaboration. Saïd’s study of Orientalism was a personal investment derived from his awareness of being an ‘Oriental’; an attempt to ‘inventory the traces’(Ibid, 40). He explains this as the reason for centering the Islamic Orient in his work. The second aspect of his contemporary reality was the methodological question—'that there is no such thing as a merely given, or simply available, starting point: beginnings have to be made for each project in such a way as to enable what follows from them’(Ibid). Labelle (2022) argues that Saïd’s decolonial beginnings stretched as far back as his 1968 essay ‘The Arab Portrayed’ where he critiqued the media’s portrayal of Arabs, then with his second book Beginnings in 1975, and in a 1977 essay on eliminating all forms of discrimination. The third aspect of Saïd’s contemporary reality, which he had listed as the first, was the distinction between pure and political knowledge—'the latter where ideology is woven directly into written material’(Saïd, 1978, 40). His argument here is that each humanistic investigation must be contextualized historically and socially. He argued that historical power structures—namely colonial ones—not only influence, but determine, the shape of knowledge around various subjects. It is here that he borrowed from the works of Michel Foucault and Frantz Fanon—both of whom are cited widely in his work.

Key Argument

            Saïd’s Orientalism (1978) remains widely recognized as one of the most influential texts in the humanities, and one that launched a rightfully penetrating attack on the West’s imagination of the Orient and its construction in the text and media. As a literary critic, he believed in the power of words and storytelling, and identified a power structure visible in Western literary classics which portray an imagination of the Orient. He coined the term Orientalism to describe a system of thought that forges minds; a field of learned study; and an outcome of a process—Orientalizing—that is an exercise of cultural strength. This is where his inspiration from Foucault’s work on power and knowledge merges with Fanon’s work on the psychological effects of colonial subjugation. Saïd described Orientalism as a ‘distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts’ (Ibid, 36) which has a ‘cumulative and corporate identity’ [emphasis added], one that is particularly strong given its associations with traditional learning, public institutions, and ‘generically determined writing’ (Ibid, 222). The result here is a consensus of sorts: an accepted truth about the Orient from the eyes of the ‘superior’ in a power hierarchy. In this Orientalizing process, there is a “certain will or intention” (Ibid, 36) to understand, control, manipulate, and incorporate, a world deemed manifestly different and lesser. Orientalism is not simply about misrepresenting the Orient as a demonized and dehumanized ‘other’; it has less to do with the Orient itself and more to do with the West—the perceived centre of the world. Orientalism therefore is a set of constraints upon, and limitations of, thought where the distinction between Occidental superiority and Oriental inferiority is ineradicable. Nevertheless, Saïd instead chose to believe ‘in the determining imprint of individual writers upon the otherwise collective anonymous body of texts constituting a discursive formation like Orientalism’ (Ibid, 23). While Saïd did not offer alternatives to Orientalism in the book and was criticized for not doing so (Owen, 2012), he explored them in other works. In Culture and Imperialism (1993), he adapted a musical term for literary criticism, arguing that literary works should be considered contrapuntally (Saïd et al., 2000, xxix). By contrapuntal criticism, Saïd meant that European culture must be read ‘in relation to its geographic and spatial relations to empire as well as in counterpoint to the works the colonized themselves produced in response to colonial domination (Ibid). He did not believe that models for harmonious world order were ready at hand (Saïd, 1993, 21), but he believed in ‘continued operation in a spirit  of opposition’, rather than in accommodation, dissenting against the status quo.

            This need for dissent contributes to the existential tone which Saïd’s work carries. He openly questioned the place of literary critics like himself in society. Conrad’s and Fanon’s existentialism triggered Saïd’s, and Saïd’s existentialism triggered my own as I worked on this report. According to Saïd, it was ‘the openness of the conscious mind that critic and writer meet to engage in the act of knowing and being aware of an experience’ (Labelle, 2022, 607). Saïd deduced that ‘questions of human existence had to grapple with one’s positionality in humanity at large—that is, one’s relationships with both others and otherness within a worldly structure’ (Ibid). Engaging in this self-reflection, Saïd also wrote about intellectualism in exile, which was personal to him as both strangely compelling and terrible to experience. This work remains relevant in a world where scholars are displaced by conflict, oppressive regimes, and climate change. Saïd asks, ‘what is it exactly that exile affords you?’ He explored the downsides and privileges of exile, namely that it grants us multiple perspectives, each corresponding to the places we have been and the multiple complexities in our experience and therefore written work.

In Application

In 1979, Saïd broadened the Orientalism argument to expose the underlying ethnocentric assumptions behind the idea that Islam is a homogenous and monolithic threat to US hegemony. He advocated that reporters and critics writing about the American embassy seizure in Iran ‘develop a sense of internationalism and “worldliness” to grasp the events in the greater context of US involvement’ in the country (2000, xxvi). While Western foreign policies over the past few decades have evolved in terms of seeing Islam as pluralistic, they have learned to manipulate sectarian differences towards creating further schisms in the Middle East and Muslim world. Post-2003 Iraq is a disastrous example of both ignorance and manipulation of sectarian differences. Similar to Saïd’s Orientalizing process, sectarianization (Mabon, 2020) is one where societies are conditioned via state and social institutions to view everything through a sectarian lens where systems of knowledge are formed around creating a sectarian hierarchy. As we engage with sectarianization discourse, we would benefit from revisiting Saïd’s work and understanding how desectarianization unfolds and who determines what works for which society. Since 2003, discourse around Iraq has both Orientalized and sectarianized it. It has often externalized and reduced Iraqis to a passive polity awaiting liberation from a corrupt set of politicians who cannot fulfill promises, or a vengeful lot more concerned about settling old grievances than running their country (Hamoudi, 2008). The dangerous combination of Orientalizing and sectarianizing Iraq discourse now demands the decolonization of Iraq research.

The body of research on decolonization and the decolonize the curriculum (al Attar & Abdelkarim, 2021) movement has grown so much that it has been embedded in various fields, such as Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL). As exciting as this may be, it is set to meet obstacles. Saïd described Orientalism as an eradicable system, resilient in the face of attempts to change the status quo. While universities and departments are increasingly adopting decolonization mandates and setting up Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion initiatives to combat racism, we see resistance. Toxic dynamics play out in anti-racism and decolonization discourse. Academics choose sides in a never-ending debate on the breadth of the problems of Orientalism and racism, what successful decolonization strategies entail, and when race is ever relevant. ‘Why bring race into everything?’ is a question we continue to hear in 2022 from the ‘colour-blind’. ‘White ignorance’ continues to dominate International Law, Security Studies, Political Science, and other fields. As a concept, ‘White Ignorance’ explains the ‘embedding of racial domination in modern thought alongside the denial of the centrality of racism in our social milieus’ (Al-Attar, 2022). In contrast to conventional ignorance, ‘white ignorance exposes both false belief and racial privilege’. It is not only about ‘“not knowing” of racial domination’s prominence, but of actively maintaining a “way of knowing” that refuses to acknowledge its prevalence’ (Ibid). Al-Attar (2022) explains that

…the rationale of aggressively cultivated ignorance is unmistakable. Acknowledging modernity’s afterlives of racism would destabilise pillars upon which our epistemology sits: liberalism, meritocracy, and equality. White ignorance is a way of fighting back, of resisting enlightenment about racial injustice, of “refus[ing] to go quietly”.

This, in addition to a growing trend where decolonization research is coopted by scholars of the ‘Global North’ and journals demand that decolonization scholars from the Global Majority cite them ( Fúnez, 2022),  emphasizes the relevance and continued significance of Edward Saïd’s work today.

Issues to be Aware Of

Orientalism was subject to many criticisms (Mart et al., 2010), mainly from Orientalists such as Bernard Lewis (1982)who felt that their work’s integrity was being attacked. Many criticisms today are from scholars who hold Saïd to a higher standard than that of a White scholar, faulting him for not studying Orientalist literature in more languages (Tarras, 2022). Scholars of the global majority are expected to read European languages and remain mute as Orientalists dominate the conversation (Said, 2001) while most Western scholars barely learn Arabic in their studies of the Middle East or any other language relevant to their body of work yet continue to dominate the conversation. This is something Saïd addressed in Culture and Imperialism and in Covering Islam. Holding scholars of the global majority to an impossible standard is to immobilize them while alive or make them irrelevant after death. Other criticisms described Orientalism as more personal, political, and polemical than scholarly and academic (Owen, 2012). However, such criticisms beg the question: is there such a thing as genuinely objective scholarship? The idea that we have no personal positionality in our research and impact on it is a myth sold to us by the West which pushed European and Western subjectivities as global objectivity. Today, we see many scholars of the Middle East de-centering voices from the ground in their research and treating locals as mere subjects of study, not as collectives and individuals with personal stories and truths gravely impacted by this scholarship and its influences on foreign policy. Considering the personal dimension of our work invites us to be mindful of our positionalities in research. It invites us to be aware of subjective prejudices and portrayals of the ‘other’.

Suggested Readings

Saïd, E. W. (1975). Beginnings: Intention and method. Columbia University Press.

Saïd, E. W. (1978). Orientalism (First edition). Pantheon Books.

Saïd, E. W. (1993). Culture and imperialism (First edition). Knopf.

Saïd, E. W. (1997). Covering Islam: How the media and the experts determine how we see the rest of the world (Revised edition). Vintage.

Saïd, E. W., Mustafa, Bayoumi, and Rubin, Andrew. (2000). The Edward Saïd reader (M. Bayoumi & A. Rubin, Eds.). Vintage Books. 

Saïd, E. W. (2000a). Out of place: A memoir. Granta.

Saïd, E. W. (2001). Reflections on exile and other literary and cultural essays. Granta.

Brennan, T. (2021). Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said. Bloomsbury Publishing.

References

al Attar, M., & Abdelkarim, S. (2021). Decolonising the Curriculum in International Law: Entrapments in Praxis and Critical Thought. Law and Critique. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978...

Al-Attar, M. (2022, September 30). Tackling White Ignorance in International Law—“How Much Time Do You Have? It’s Not Enough”. Opinio Juris. http://opiniojuris.org/2022/09...

Hamoudi, H. A. (2008, March 20). Iraq Five Years On: An Iraqi Legislative Perspective. Jurist.Org. https://www.jurist.org/comment...

Jairo I. Fúnez, PhD [@Jairo_I_Funez]. (2022, September 13). Who are some Indigenous-Black-Indigenous intellectuals (activists & poets) from Latin America & the Caribbean that more people should read? Please add to the list! Gladys Tzul Tzul Adriana Guzman Arroyo Manuel Zapata Olivella Aura Cumes Juan Bautista Segales Fausto Reinaga [Tweet]. Twitter. https://twitter.com/Jairo_I_Fu...

Labelle, M. J. M. (2022). On the Decolonial Beginnings of Edward Said. Modern Intellectual History, 19(2), 600–624. https://doi.org/10.1017/S14792...

Lewis, B. (1982, June 24). The Question of Orientalism. The New York Review, XXIX(11). https://www.nybooks.com/articl...

Mabon, S. (2020). Four Questions about De-sectarianization. The Review of Faith & International Affairs, 18(1), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1080/155702...

Mart, Ç. T., Toker, A., & Esen, M. F. (2010). Criticism on Edward Said’s Orientalism. 7.

Owen, R. (2012, April 20). Edward Said and the Two Critiques of Orientalism. Middle East Institute. https://www.mei.edu/publicatio...

Saïd, E. (1977). Intellectual Origins of Imperialism and Zionism (Zionism and Racism). International Organization for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.

Said, E. (2001). Orientalism Reconsidered. In Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Granta.

Saïd, E. W. (1978). Orientalism (First edition). Pantheon Books.

Saïd, E. W. (1993). Culture and imperialism (First edition). Knopf. http://www.gbv.de/dms/bowker/t...

Saïd, E. W. (2000). The Edward Saïd reader (M. Bayoumi & A. Rubin, Eds.). Vintage Books. http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/b...

Tarras, P. (2022, October 7). Edward Said famously left aside German engagements with the Orient. Twitter. https://twitter.com/peter_tarr...