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Product Description
Product Description
ORIENTALISM is one of the greatest and most influential of books of ideas to be published since the end of the European empires. For generations now it has defined our understanding of colonialism and empire and with each passing year its influencebecomes if anything even greater.
To mark its 25th anniversary, ORIENTALISM rightfully takes its place as a Pengun Modern Classic.
About the Author
EDWARD W. SAID is University Professor at Columbia University. He was born in Jerusalem in 1935 and educated in Egypt and the United States. His other books include THE QUESTION OF PALESTINE, CULTURE AND IMPERIALISM, OUT OF PLACE: A MEMOIR.
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First Sentence
On June 13, 1910, Arthur James Balfour lectured the House of Commons on "the problems with which we have to deal in Egypt." Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
On June 13, 1910, Arthur James Balfour lectured the House of Commons on "the problems with which we have to deal in Egypt." Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Instant classic,
By
This review is from: Orientalism (Paperback)
If you are hesitating between 'Orientalism' and 'Culture and Empire', 'Orientalism' is probably the book to get. It was Saïd's first and original contribution, and it is about culture, his field, more than about history, in which he was not a specialist.
Saïd argues that Orientalism paved the ground for, and was later sustained by, colonialism in that it created fixed categories by which the Orient became known to Europeans. These stereotyped views emphasizing, say, fatalism, superstition, or a lack of a conception of liberty, predisposed Europeans to rule over the peoples they classified as Oriental. Saïd's point is that Orientalism owed more to textual analysis than to actual conditions in the East, enabling Europeans to project their own fantasies, wishes, and prejudices onto Orientals. History and archaeology, for example, interpreting the Orient through its classical cultures (ancient Egypt, Sanskrit, Sufi poetry, etc..), supported perceptions of Orientals as impervious to progress and at the same time of civilisations in decline and therefore in need of regeneration through European power. While some of Saïd's references are obscure, especially of some twentieth-century Orientalists, many draw from mainstream literature (Dante, Flaubert, Lane) or immediately graspable travel, historical, and political works. Most are entertaining and thought-provoking, sometimes hilarious, and Saïd's exegesis is consistently witty and incisive. Saïd's is no doubt a partial view, and it has been criticized as well as emulated. But the author himself makes no total claim on his sources, many of which he professes to admire. This is a book about culture, not history: it brings to light a certain undercurrent in a body of work and literature, it does not aim to explain colonialism. (Indeed, this is probably why 'Orientalism' is less problematic than 'Culture and Empire': Saïd's work as history faces issues of chronology - Orientalism in art, for example, was in terminal decline when Britain and France began to grab the Middle East in earnest - and it is weaker at connecting representation to agency.) Finally, nor is 'Orientalism' about the evils of colonisation as such, or even the truthfulness of Orientalist writing. It is a decoding of a 200+ year-long academic and artistic tradition, no more or less. Saïd's interest is in studying Orientalism as cultural phenomenon, not an Orient which he argues is, as a category, mythical anyway. But it is best to quote the author: 'One scarcely knows what to make of these caricatural permutations of a book that to its author and in its arguments is explicitly anti-essentialist, radically sceptical about all categorical designations such as Orient and Occident, and painstakingly careful about not "defending" or even discussing the Orient and Islam.' This book is a must for anyone interested in the meaning of cultural difference, and it is an exhilarating, sometimes electrifying read.
68 of 82 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An utterly outstanding book that demands reading,
By A Customer
This review is from: Orientalism (Paperback)
Few works are more deserving of the 'Modern Classic' label that Penguin has given this book. Perhaps it is only after nearly twenty year since its first publication that we are able to appreciate the prophetic and uniquely influential nature of Said's insights into the roots of the 'West's' antagonism towards the 'Orient'. For what is, in effect, little more than a book of literary criticism, the ramifications for all areas of scholarly research and investigation are remarkable. On a personal level it is a book that has profoundly affected both my political and academic outlook and forced a re-evaluation of my attitudes (and not just towards the Middle-East) and, more significantly, the underlying deceits or conspiracies of history on which they are founded. I urge every person in a position of power to study this canonical work. That it is hard reading does not detract from but adds to the power of the work; at every moment Said's intimidating (but inspiringly humanistic and humane) scholarship is in evidence and one can only marvel at his analytical dexterity. Those who see the book as repetative and hypocritically reductive have failed to grasp the true substance which is in the criticism and not primarily in the conclusions which are, for the most part, self-evident, as Said himself declares from the outset. There will, I am sure, continue be numerous wilful misreadings of 'Orientalism' and that it continues to provoke such controversy is a testament to its brilliance. Ignore them and read it.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"bridging the chasm",
This review is from: Orientalism (Paperback)
Edward Said provides a concise justification for writing this large and complex book - and equally suggests a convincing reason for reading it - in his Afterword: "Orientalism is a study based on the re-thinking of what had for centuries been believed to be an unbridgeable chasm separating East from West. My aim... was not so much to dissipate difference - for who can deny the constitutive role of national as well as cultural differences in the relationships between human beings - but to challenge the notion that difference implies hostility, a frozen reified set of opposed essences, and a whole adversarial knowledge built out of those things."
As might be expected, this is a difficult book - to be read carefully, weighing each word - more a long difficult hike than a gentle cruise; nevertheless a `hike' that in the end leaves one feeling greatly enriched. In dealing with the centuries-old traducing of the people and culture of the East by intellectuals of the West, Said begins with Giambattista Vico's observation "...that men make their own history, that what they can know is what they have made," extending this with a detailed analysis of the writings of western historians, travel writers and politicians about `the Orient' which began in a systematic way with Napoleon's conquest of Egypt in 1798. Said is first and foremost a literary theorist and critic, however, and much of the pleasure in reading this book comes from his profound knowledge of the European literary background in which the orientalist theme can be traced to Dante, and perhaps even as far back as Aeschylus. The body of Said's work is a fascinating exposition of the opinions of 19th century writers on the `orient' as different as the scientific philologist Renan, who never went there, and the romantic poets Nerval and Flaubert who traveled there in search of the "fabulously exotic and antique". Perhaps one of the most startling passages quotes Karl Marx's apparent approval of the cruelty and destructiveness of colonialism on the grounds that, while it was willfully destroying the ancient forms of civilization, causing a social revolution in Hindustan "actuated only by the vilest interests," for him the real issue was: "...whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution." We are indeed fortunate that we have the consciousness of Said as an antidote to all such blatant instrumentalism. Perhaps his greatest insight, echoing Nietzsche, is that Orientalism is a "system of representations" whose "truths... are embodied in language, and what is the truth of language... but a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms and anthropomorphisms - in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people; truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are." As the pieces are once again thrown in the air in those territories we refer to as `The Middle East,' it seems more than ever necessary to re-examine the illusionary canons. We can wish for no better guide than Edward Said.
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