My Reaction to Edward Said's "Orientalism"

It was several years ago that I first read Edward Said's book Orientalism. It is, of course, post modern garbage. That this steaming pile of offal has been completely debunked doesn't prevent it from being required reading in college classrooms. I had to reread this thing for my course on historiography. It was assigned as an example of "post-colonial" "thought." I had to write a short reaction paper on it. It follows:

Edward Said’s “Orientalism” thesis mates together cultural relativism, Foucault’s subjectivism and Gramsci’s ideas on cultural subversion. The result is less viable than a mule. Said could not get through the introduction without playing the victim card. This is fitting, given that his thesis contends that the Middle-East has been, and remains, the victim of Western imperialism. Here we can witness a tenured professor at Columbia University, a Harvard Ph.D., a past president of the Modern Language Association whose books are required reading in university classrooms throughout the country, whining about his “uniquely punishing destiny” (27) in the racist, imperialistic West. If this was not so pathetic and absurd, it would be funny.

Said’s sniveling connotes the purpose of his life’s work: to inculcate guilt and self-loathing into his Western readers in order to further his Gramsci-like cultural agenda. Said states his agenda in the context of a discussion on one of his many bêtes noires, Paul Johnson. Said was responding to an article where Johnson argued in favor of the neo-con enterprise that the civilized nations should impose its rule on the world’s failed states. Said correctly identifies a growing gulf between the “public consciousness” on the superiority of Western society and its values and “a wide sector of intellectuals, academics and artists” who have imbibed the ideas of cultural relativism and multiculturalism (348). Said's purpose was to close that gap by corrupting the field of Middle East Studies.

Said’s thesis is based on his view that there is no real difference between the Orient and the Occident. He position is that if not for Western “Orientalists” imposing there narratives upon the East, the very concept of “East is East and West is West” would never have arisen. Said unites this idea with his well-known view that the West requires the “Other” in order to define itself. Said agrees with Foucault that knowledge and scholarship are about power and domination and little else. In a passage on this topic, Said describes his view of Western scholarship as simply the result of a consensus which imposes a narrative structure based on authority (21-2). In this discussion, Said does not even acknowledge the existence or possibility of knowledge and truth. It is Said’s hope that his acid wash of literary theory will help intellectually disarm the West during its period of cultural decay and death: “indeed if it eliminates the ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’ altogether, then we shall have advanced a little in the process of what Raymond Williams called the ‘unlearning’ of ‘the inherent dominative mode’” (28).

It should go without saying that Said’s rubbish has been thoroughly eviscerated by such real scholars and historians as Keith Windschuttle, Ibn Warraq and Bernard Lewis. For example, last year Warraq published his masterful Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism. Nevertheless, Said’s mendacious work is still de rigueur in American college classrooms. While on the other hand, the Kansas State University library has yet to purchase a copy of Warraq’s book. Of course, Said’s continued popularity in academia says more about that institution’s culture than that of the Middle-East.

Crossposted at The Dougout