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🪵 The Threshold

Empire shifting to the US carried Orientalist scholars across the Atlantic with it

Properties2
tagsja-picks, causal_relationships, singleton, xref, category/causal-relationships
aliases@said_orientalism_1978, loc. 724

4 min read

Empire shifting to the US carried Orientalist scholars across the Atlantic with it

Evidence

Since World War II, and more noticeably after each of the Arab-Israeli wars, the Arab Muslim has become a figure in American popular culture, even as in the academic world, in the policy planner’s world, and in the world of business very serious attention is being paid the Arab. This symbolizes a major change in the international configuration of forces. France and Britain no longer occupy center stage in world politics; the American imperium has displaced them. A vast web of interests now links all parts of the former colonial world to the United States, just as a proliferation of academic subspecialties divides (and yet connects) all the former philological and European-based disciplines like Orientalism. The area specialist, as he is now called, lays claims to regional expertise, which is put at the service of government or business or both. The massive, quasi-material knowledge stored in the annals of modern European Orientalism—as recorded, for example, in Jules Mohl’s nineteenth-century logbook of the field—has been dissolved and released into new forms. A wide variety of hybrid representations of the Orient now roam the culture. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 724 (#expands, via linked claim)

Yet my discussion of that domination and systematic interest does not do justice to (a) the important contributions to Orientalism of Germany, Italy, Russia, Spain, and Portugal and (b) the fact that one of the important impulses toward the study of the Orient in the eighteenth century was the revolution in Biblical studies stimulated by such variously interesting pioneers as Bishop Lowth, Eichhorn, Herder, and Michaelis. In the first place, I had to focus rigorously upon the British-French and later the American material because it seemed inescapably true not only that Britain and France were the pioneer nations in the Orient and in Oriental studies, but that these vanguard positions were held by virtue of the two greatest colonial networks in pre-twentieth-century history; the American Oriental position since World War II has fit—I think, quite self-consciously—in the places excavated by the two earlier European powers. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 81 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

While it is true to say that the United States did not in fact become a world empire until the twentieth century, it is also true that during the nineteenth century the United States was concerned with the Orient in ways that prepared for its later, overtly imperial concern. Leaving aside the campaigns against the Barbary pirates in 1801 and 1815, let us consider the founding of the American Oriental Society in 1842. At its first annual meeting in 1843 its president, John Pickering, made the very clear point that America proposed for itself the study of the Orient in order to follow the example of the imperial European powers. Pickering’s message was that the framework of Oriental studies—then as now—was political, not simply scholarly. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 745 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: European Orientalist scholars transplanted their paradigm to US universities as imperial power shifted — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 254; American empire inherited and reformulated European Orientalism after World War II — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 724; British, French, then American Orientalism follows the rise and fall of colonial empires — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 81 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

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