Orientalism as a Postcolonial Theory

Assignment-3 

Orientalism as a postcolonial theory 

Academic Information:

Name: Insiyafatema Alvani 

Batch: 2023-2024 (M.A Sem 3) 

Roll no: 11

Enrolment number: 4069206420220001

Paper: 203 - The Postcolonial Studies 

Paper Code: 22408

Submitted to: S. B. Gardi Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

Email id: insiyafatemaalvani@gmail.com

What is Postcolonialism?

Postcolonialism is the study of the effects of imperialism on nations as a result of the invasion and settlement of European nations. It demonstrates how colonial laws in many regions of the world affected local populations, opening one of the most significant chapters in human history. The traits of postcolonialism represent a substantial shift in society necessary to end colonialism. Additionally, it shows the methods used by colonial authorities to dominate the local or subordinate population. Furthermore, it also revealed how new empires were emerging and spreading throughout the globe, giving rise to an endless desire for dominance and strength. The period of human history that is being studied spans from the fifteenth to the twentieth century.

A possible working definition for postcolonialism is that it involves a studied engagement with the experience of colonialism and its past and present effects, both at the local level of ex-colonial societies and at the level of more general global developments thought to be the after-effects of empire. Postcolonialism often also involves the discussion of experiences such as slavery, migration, suppression and resistance, difference, race, gender and place as well as responses to the discourses of imperial Europe such as history, philosophy, anthropology and linguistics. The term is as much about conditions under imperialism and colonialism proper, as about conditions coming after the historical end of colonialism. A growing concern among postcolonial critics has also been with racial minorities in the west, embracing Native and African Americans in the US, British Asians and African Caribbeans in the UK and Aborigines in Australia and Canada, among others. Because of these features, postcolonialism allows for a wide range of applications, designating a constant interplay and slippage between the sense of a historical transition, a socio-cultural location and an epochal configuration.

Introduction:

Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) is considered as pivotal in the shaping of postcolonial studies. In Orientalism, Said argued for seeing a direct correlation between the knowledge that oriental scholars produced and how these were redeployed in the constitution of colonial rule.

"East is east, West is west

And never the twain shall meet”

Edward Wadie Said was a Palestinian American literary theorist. He was born in Jerusalem.He was an American citizen through his father. Said’s father was a Palestinian who served in the US army in World War I.Said’s father was granted US citizenship for his military services. After the War in 1919 Said’s father moved to Cairo and established his stationery business. Said spent his childhood in Jerusalem and Cairo (Egypt), where he attended elite British and American schools. Subsequently he left for the United States, where he obtained a Bachelor's Degree from Princeton and a Doctorate in English Literature from Harvard. Said then joined the faculty of Columbia University in 1963 where he became Professor of English and Comparative Literature in 1991. Some of the great works of Said are – 

• 'Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography' (1966)
• 'Beginnings: Intention and Method' (1975)
• 'Orientalism' (1978)
• 'The Question of Palestine'(1979)
• 'Covering Islam' (1981)
• 'Yeats and Decolonization' (1988)

Said is best known for his book „Orientalism‟. Said‟s work became one of the foundational texts for Post Colonialism or Post Colonial studies. 

What is Orientalism?

The word “orientalism‟ is a noun form of the adjective “oriental‟ which means something related to eastern countries, but in the context of Said “orientalism‟ simply does not mean something related to the eastern countries, it means the misrepresentation of the people and the culture of the Eastern countries Like Middle East, Asia and North Africa. Said used the word “Orientalism‟ to refer to the West‟s perception and depiction of Middle Eastern, Asian and North African societies. Edward Said defines "Orientalism" as follows: 

“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.”

‘Orientalism’ by Edward Said is a canonical text of cultural studies in which he has challenged the concept of orientalism or the difference between east and west, as he puts it. He says that with the start of European colonization the Europeans came in contact with the lesser developed countries of the east. They found their civilization and culture very exotic, and established the science of orientalism, which was the study of the orientals or the people from these exotic civilizations. The Europeans used orientalism to define themselves. Some particular attributes were associated with the orientals, and whatever the orientals weren’t the occidents were. The Europeans defined themselves as the superior race compared to the orientals; and they justified their colonization by this concept. They said that it was their duty towards the world to civilize the uncivilized world. Said starts by analyzing public speeches and writings of the British imperialists of the early 20th century about Egypt, that since the British Imperial authorities “know better‟ their country , they have a natural right to rule it.- “There are Westerners, and there are Orientals. The former dominate; the latter must be dominated, which usually means having the land occupied, their internal affairs rigidly controlled, their blood and treasure put at the disposal of one or another Western power.”

The essentialization of the East: 

Orientalism tends to portray the East as a monolithic entity, ignoring the diversity of cultures and experiences within the region.The main problem, however, arose when the Europeans started generalizing the attributes they associated with orientals, and started portraying these artificial characteristics associated with orientals in their western world through their scientific reports, literary work, and other media sources. What happened was that it created a certain image about the orientals in the European mind and in doing that infused a bias in the European attitude towards the orientals. This prejudice was also found in the orientalists and all their scientific research and reports were under the influence of this. The generalized attributes associated with the orientals can be seen even today, for example, the Arabs are defined as uncivilized people; and Islam is seen as the religion of the terrorist. Western misrepresentations of Islam are a dominant aspect of orientalism. 

The word "Orientalist" generally refers to any Western scholar who studies Islam regardless of his or her motives and thus, inevitably, distorts it. Said has described the misrepresentation of Islam in these words : “So far as the United States seems to be concerned, it is only a slight overstatement to say that Muslims and the Arabs are essentially seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists. Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab-Muslims life has entered, the awareness of even those people whose profession is to report the Arab world. What we have, instead, is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world presented in such a way as to make that world vulnerable to military aggression.

The binary opposition between the West and the East: 

Orientalism constructs the West as rational, progressive, and civilized, while the East is represented as irrational, backward, and barbaric. The creation of binary opposition structures changed the way we view others. In the case of colonialism, the Oriental and the Westerner were distinguished as different from each other. The emotional, static, Orient vs. the principled, progressive Occident - this opposition justified the "white man's burden," the colonizer's self-perceived "destiny to rule" subordinate peoples. In contrast, post-colonialism seeks out areas of hybridity and trans - culturalization. This aspect is particularly relevant during processes of globalization. Some postcolonial writers have critiqued Said's homogeneous binary of Occident and Orient, insisting that multiple variations of Orientalism have been created within the western world and are at work. Said believes that Europe used Orientalism as a homogeneous "other" to form a more cohesive European identity.

Postcolonial literature:

Postcolonial literature is a body of literary writings that reacts to the discourse of colonization. In postcolonialism and related fields, subaltern refers to persons socially, politically, and geographically outside of the hegemonic power structure. The term, derived from the work of the Marxist theorist, Antonio Gramsci, entered postcolonial studies through the work of the Subaltern Studies Group, a collective of South Asian historians interested in exploring the role of non-elite actors in South Asian history. In the 1970s, the term began to be used as a reference to colonized people in the South Asian subcontinent. It provided a new perspective on the history of a colonized place from the perspective of the colonized rather than from the viewpoint of the colonizers. 

Postcolonial literature represents all these conditions and comes from various sources and inspiration. It includes works such as Samuel Beckett’s Murphy, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. among many others. Shakespeare’s Othello, Antony and Cleopatra and The Tempest have been taken as key texts for the application of postcolonial modes of analysis. This suggests that postcolonial literature is a broad term that encompasses literatures by people from the erstwhile colonial world, as well as from the various minority diasporas that live in the west. Post-colonial literature consists of writings and texts that discuss the colonial relationship between the colonizers and the colonized. These texts often focus on the decolonization of a region through its search for independence from the colonizing power. Post-colonialism additionally acts as an opposition to the ideals and attitudes in colonial literature which emphasized and glorified the violent actions of imperialism. Examples of post-colonial novels are "Heart of Darkness" by Joseph Conrad and "Things Fall Apart" by Chinua Achebe. Appropriation is the process of one culture adopting and conforming to the elements of another culture. In post-colonial literature, appropriation occurs as colonized land is composed of many cultural influences from both the native people being colonized and the enforced cultural values of the colonizers. Appropriation is often discussed in post-colonial literature through the perspective of the colonized; they reject conforming to the culture of the colonizers who have taken over the land and seek independence. It can be seen as equally problematic if majority groups attempt to appropriate from minority cultures. As they borrow elements of minority cultures without knowing the extent of the cultural significance or meaning of the practice, majority groups can change the meaning of these elements to the detriment of the minority culture. 

Subaltern Theory:

"Subaltern Studies" began in the early 1980s as an "intervention in South Asian historiography." While "subaltern" began as a model for the Subcontinental, it quickly developed into a "vigorous postcolonial critique." Subaltern is now regularly used as a term in history, anthropology, sociology, human geography, and literature.

The term subaltern is used in postcolonial theory. The exact meaning of the term in current philosophical and critical usage is disputed. Some thinkers use it in a general sense to refer to marginalized groups and the lower classes - a person rendered without agency by his or her social status. Others, such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak use it in a more specific sense. She argues that:

“subaltern is not just a classy word for oppressed, for Other, for somebody who's not getting a piece of the pie....In postcolonial terms, everything that has limited or no access to the culture imperialism is subaltern - a space of difference.Now who would say that's just the oppressed? The working class is oppressed. It's not subaltern....Many people want to claim subalternity. They are the least interesting and the most dangerous. I mean, just by being a discriminated against minority on the university campus, they don't need the word 'subaltern'...They should see what the mechanics of the discrimination are. They're within the hegemonic discourse wanting a piece of the pie and not being allowed, so let them speak, use the hegemonic discourse. They should not call themselves subalterns”.

Subaltern was first used in a non-military sense by Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Some believe that he used the term as a synonym for proletariat, possibly as a codeword in order to get his writings past prison censors, while others believe his usage to be broader and less clear cut.In several essays, Homi Bhabha, a key thinker within postcolonial thought, emphasizes the importance of social power relations in his working definition of subaltern groups as oppressed, minority groups whose presence was crucial to the self-definition of the majority group: subaltern social groups were also in a position to subvert the authority of those who had hegemonic power.

Unheard and Unseen - Amplifying Subaltern Voices:

Joanne Sharp, following Spivak, argues that other forms of knowing are marginalized by Western thinkers reforming them as myth or folklore. In order to be heard the subaltern must adopt Western thought, reasoning and language. Because of this, Sharp and Spivak argue that the subalterns can never express their own reasoning, forms of knowledge or logic, they must instead form their knowledge to Western ways of knowing.The abandonment of one’s customary thoughts, and the subsequent adoption of Western thought is necessary in many postcolonial situations. The subordinated individual can only be heard by his oppressors if he speaks their language. Therefore, filters of conformity muddle the true voice of the subaltern.

As Colonial Historian Fernando Coronil asserts, our goal must be “to listen to the subaltern subjects, and to interpret what I hear”, and to engage them and interact with their voice. We cannot ascend to a position of dominance over the voice, subjugating its words to the meanings we desire to attribute to them. That is simply another form of discrimination. The power to narrate somebody’s story is a heavy task, and we must be cautious and aware of the complications involved. Spivak and bell hooks question the academic engagement with the Other. To truly engage with the subaltern they argue that an academic would need to decenter him or herself as the expert. Traditionally the academic wants to know about the subaltern's experiences but not their own explanations of those experiences. 

hooks argues that according to the received view in Western knowledge a true explanation can only come from the expertise of the academic. The subordinated subject, gives up their knowledge for the use of the Western academic. hooks describes the relationship between the academic and the subaltern subject: No need to hear your voice when I can talk about you better than you can speak about yourself. No need to hear your voice. Only tell me about your pain. I want to know your story. And then I will tell it back to you in a new way. Tell it back to you in such a way that it has become mine, my own. Re-writing you I write myself anew. I am still author, authority. I am still colonizer the speaking subject and you are now at the center of my talk.We must not take a lumbering aspect of superiority while studying these voices. The Subaltern's story is a way that we can build a bigger historical picture for ourselves. It allows for us a revealing look at a society, from the perspective of the most powerless individuals that live within its confines.

Examples from Literature:

In Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) the hero Robinson becomes a prototype of British colonialism and Friday the symbol of subject races. Robinson is represented as Hercules with a muscular body while Friday a Negro and a cannibal as physically less strong than Crusoe. The oriental women encountered by Crusoe are also shown as starkly nude. Robinson imposes upon Friday his language, religion and God. He teaches Friday to call him Master. In this text Friday is submissive, uncivilized and uncouth. The cannibals from the place of Friday are shown when they are feasting on other cannibals by killing them. But in reality cannibals eat their own kind, but only after the death, they do not kill and eat. 

In Albert Camus’s The Outsider (1942) the Arabs are represented as murderers who are killed by Meursault (French-Algerian). None of the Arabs are named in this novel like Friday. Mr. Raymond’s girlfriend's brother and his Arab friends are represented as Murderers.

In E.M.Foster’s A Passage to India also there are such stereotypes. For example, in a trip to Marabar caves Mrs. Adela Quested charges on Aziz that he wanted to rape her even if he had done nothing like that. Actually the west assumes that Indians are rapists, this is how things are ideologically brought up in many of the western texts. Again Mrs. Moore after coming to India speaks that Indians need civilization which the west can give them and is considered superior to the east.

Iron Man - Hollywood Movie:

In a recent Hollywood movie Iron Man - Arabs/Russians are represented as murderers. Tony Stark is an English hero who is kidnapped by Arabs. It is important to think about why the villains in Iron Man are mostly from the Middle East. The villains of Iron Man are Arabs. The original comic version of Iron Man was first released in 1963, during the Vietnam War. In the original run, Tony Stark’s captors were Vietnamese communists. Although it could again be argued that the villain is “Oriental” and therefore can be subjected to criticisms of orientalism.

Conclusion:

Postcolonialism studies the relationship between colonizers and the colonized, showing how colonizers are seen as superior and the colonized as inferior. Edward Said's seminal work, "Orientalism," stands as a pivotal contribution to postcolonial studies. Said meticulously dissects the Western construction of the Orient, revealing how Orientalist discourse has shaped perceptions of the East as exotic, irrational, and inferior, reinforcing a dichotomy of power between the West and the non-Western world. Said's work has been criticized for not focusing on resistance to colonialism. However, his work opened the way for others to explore these issues. To be fair Said has responded positively to some of the criticism made on him. In recent years he has looked more closely at resistance to Orientalism , covered in his book ‘Orientalism Reconsidered’ and ‘Culture and Imperialism’. However, it would be unfair to conclude that just because Said does not venture into the latter territory he necessarily suggests that the colonialist discourse is all pervasive. Foucault’s own work suggests that domination and resistance are inextricably linked. Foucault himself has been criticized by Gayatri Spivak for not paying attention to colonial expansion as a feature of European civil society or how colonialism may have affected the power/knowledge system of the modern European state. 

Postcolonialism has fundamentally changed our understanding of colonialism's impact. He opened the way to various critics, such as, Spivak and Bhabha to explore their theories. His book Orientalism served as a monument to postcolonial studies. In conclusion, postcolonialism, with its roots in Said's work and the contributions of subsequent scholars, has transformed our understanding of the enduring legacy of colonialism. His book Orientalism stands as a cornerstone of postcolonial studies.

Words - 3,188, Images - 9

Refrences:

Bryant, Aidan. “Iron Man: A Case Study in Orientalism and Hegemony.” KnightScholar, 2011, https://knightscholar.geneseo.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1190&context=proceedings-of-great-day. Accessed 27 November 2023.

Das, Pallab. “Study materials on Postcolonialism - Course.” Mankar College, https://www.mankarcollege.ac.in/studyMaterial/145910SM_on_Postcolonialism_Sem_6__DSE_3.pdf. Accessed 27 November 2023.

Das, Pallab. “Study materials on Postcolonialism - Course.” Mankar College, Sep 2015, https://www.mankarcollege.ac.in/studyMaterial/145910SM_on_Postcolonialism_Sem_6__DSE_3.pdf. Accessed 27 November 2023.

Jack, Robbie. “What is postcolonial literature?” The British Academy, 2 January 2020, https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/blog/what-is-postcolonial-literature/. Accessed 27 November 2023.