(Tina)Theresa Hannah-Munns
Book Review
Leona Anderson
June 23, 2006
Said, Edward W. (2003). Orientalism, 25th Anniversary Ed.
Edward Said descriptively deconstructs the hidden assumptions, presuppositions, and the power dynamics that underlie the historical construction of the academic Orientalist tradition of scholarship. It is this scholarly pursuit which delineates and delimits a polarization and dichotomous relationship between the categories of East and West as if these were two concrete entities. His cross-literary analysis is expansive, beginning with the historical significance of English and French scholarly traditions that are then taken over by United States Orientalists after World War II. Every page consist of the historically linear exposure of the consequences Orientalist scholarship has had in the production of a “Western” Oriental image, specifically that of the Muslim and Arab individual and society set up against the opposed identity of Euro-American individuals, institutions, and social bodies. While Said recognizes that his critical analysis is to tear down the oppositional character of this knowledge construction, he also acknowledges that to do his deconstruction process he must work within this polarization in order to eliminate the idea of a “permanent divide” (336). Unfortunately, this divide seems to be solidified and encapsulated within his argument even if it be known that this book is only the descriptive aspect that is followed with other books containing alternative and reconstructive strategies published by this same author. Also, his focus on the “Orientalist” solidifies a monolithic identity that defines all scholars within this field of studies, no matter their various intents and methodological/ theoretical location.
The tight narration of critique highlights such diverse phenomena as academic identity formulation and maintenance due to handling subject matter; social identity construction and the processes of dismemberment and othering; historical narration behind academic disciplines with their power and privilege within social constructions at large; political influences in university settings; the intention behind making and maintaining dialectic categories and types; differences between postcolonial and postmodern discourses; acknowledgements of subaltern, third world, fourth world, feminist, and ethnic fields of discourse; the advantage of disciplines over field studies; and various other points of contention that concludes with an emphasis on the need for academics to begin to reframe, reconceptualize, and revision academic practices and ways of knowing that are alternative to simple identity formation negatively formed from conceptions of the “Other.”
The range of topics, the diversity of theoretical injections, and the amount of specific analysis within Said’s arguments are brilliantly woven into a text that can be applied cross-disciplinary. While the weave was being adjusted throughout the first and second chapters, I became viscerally tense and impatient; I was not reacting from the subject matter, which is similar to my work, but to the narrations utilized in these sections. The first and second sections dealt exclusively with the British and French Orientalist treatment within their earlier contexts of imperialistic rush for the geopolitical construct of the East. My historical context as reader began to influence how I was reading through the filters of contemporary knowledge of narrative theories and critical analysis techniques. Questions began to be raised and I became impatient with his slow narration and use of outdated materials (to my context) and methodology of critique.
Interestingly, most of my arguments that began to be formulated against Edward Said’s tightly woven treatment of Orientalism was briefly touched within his rushed conclusion and/or brought forward within his extended afterword. For the first two thirds of the book, questions of historical narrativization, especially the amount of materials that must have been excluded from his treatment while accommodating the vast amount of exegesis that did receive attention, snagged at the weave of his exposition of the Orientalist agenda. While his binary code differentiated Eastern Orientals as Jewish, Muslim, and Arab while also nuancing the French, English and American Orientalists as Western agents, this narrative oppositional plotline reminded me of the fictitious construction that he was himself critiquing, especially after reading the section on the importance and pitfalls of the use of narrative in constructing history (240) and his avoidance of essentialist positions. He partially confronts this narrative problem in hindsight by articulating his choice of creating relationships between consistency and inconsistency through the use of his narration as an instrument of “play” (340), yet the threads of his discourse still ring of generalizations between oppositional poles.
Take for example his anti-essentialist position (334). Said contends that political nationalism and theoretical fundamentalism are intimately linked (347) as other processes that create power inequalities like imperialism does. As with all of Said’s arguments, this is logical and realistic. He also argues that objective scholarship tends to mystify the socio-political location of the Orientalist, yet his self-labeling as an anti-essentialist (which is humanly impossible as his own critique shares) seems to contradict his critique of objective scholarship, especially as he counters Bernard Lewis’s argument (341-345). It seems that Said links ideas such as fundamentalism and nationalism with essentialism, maybe through ideas of identity, which is an unfortunate condition for an academic that is within a boundary crossing position of analysis and so fluent in the articulation of the production of power and in recognizing its social application and critique. At least Said does recognize that his unique disposition as Oriental and Western-trained academic does give him an advantaged position in “crossing, rather than maintaining, barriers”(336). It is this position, this crossing over, that highlights the intricate relationship between academic discourse and social reality and the humanistic need to always be aware of the consequences of academic research.
