A classic work of scholarship. About how dominant ways of knowing what came to be called “the Orient” emerged as part of the Western imperial/colonial project and how they continue to pervade and shape discourse and practices of knowing in the West today. Particularly focuses on the British, French, and US examples in relation to the Muslim areas of western Asia and north Africa, but has implications far beyond. Honestly, can’t believe I hadn’t read this before – I’ve read some of Said’s other work, both some of his political writing on Palestine and also some of his other scholarly work, but not this one, his most famous book. (And, no, I did not read this in response to the latest settler colonial goings on in Palestine – I actually finished it before that began to make the news and just hadn’t posted about it yet. I read it because I talk about it a bit in the chapter of my book that I was working on most recently.)
I’m not going to say much about it, beyond a few scattered thoughts. The breadth of not just reading required to write this book, but of capacity to read all of that in sophisticated ways in historical and cultural context, is breathtaking. And, yes, at plenty of points in the book, Said is careful (as any good scholar should be) to point out the limits of the book’s scope and to downplay its reach, but it really is impressive. It was also fascinating to see the elevator pitch summary of the book – known at least in an approximate way by millions who haven’t read it, including me for at least the last two decades – expanded into such a rich and detailed exploration of the how of it all. Part of the book’s force, I think, comes from Said’s generous engagement with so many different writers and thinkers over so many years in their respective specificity, and how he shows that even with all the range of kinds of Western work regarding the so-called “Orient” – from the rigorous to the sloppy, the brilliant to the plodding, the highly original to the deeply derivative, the ostensibly sympathetic to the reactionary and racist – the grip of Orientalist framings remain unshakeable, almost without exception. It was also interesting to follow the continuity punctuated by evolution and constant reinvention of Orientalist thinking, most significantly the shift from explicitly Christian to the sort of post-Christian that the West often mistakes for secularism, and then from the era of British dominance to that of US dominance starting after the Second World War. And it was fascinating to see all of the gruesome detail of how knowledge produced by intense scrutiny performed in the service of ruling manages to be so powerfully effective in one sense and so incredibly bad in another – that is, it is very effective in serving the needs of power and in both legitimating rule in the eyes of the rulers and enabling that rule in practical terms, while resulting in a picture of the ruled that has a very tenuous and violently disjunctured relationship with how the ruled experience their own lives and the world. Which is not news, and is a central feature of our political life in all sorts of ways, but to see it explored like this was, again, fascinating.
So. A classic. A very important book. Not a short or quick one to read, but I think well worth the time.
Originally posted by Scott on Goodreads.