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Said's critique essentializes the West as much as it claims Orientalists essentialize the East

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tagsja-picks, xref, define, question, contrarian_or_surprising, trade, corroborated, category/contrarian-or-surprising
aliases@ahmad_theory_1992, loc. 335

4 min read

Said’s critique essentializes the West as much as it claims Orientalists essentialize the East

Evidence

It is rather remarkable how constantly and comfortably Said speaks – not only in this particular sentence but throughout the book – of a Europe, or the West, as a self-identical, fixed being which has always had an essence and a project, an imagination and a will; and of the ‘Orient’ as its object – textually, militarily, and so on. He speaks of the West, or Europe, as the one which produces the knowledge, the East as the object of that knowledge. In other words, he seems to posit, stable subject-object identities, as well as ontological and epistemological distinctions between the two. In what sense, then, is Said himself not an Orientalist – or at least, as Sadek el-Azm puts it, an ‘Orientalist-in-reverse’? Said quite justifiably accuses the ‘Orientalist’ of essentializing the Orient, but his own essentializing of ‘the West’ is equally remarkable. In the process, Said of course gives us that same ‘Europe’ – unified, self-identical, transhistorical, textual – which is always rehearsed for us in the sort of literary criticism which traces its own pedigree from Aristotle to T.S. Eliot. That this Athens-to-Albion Europe is itself a recent fabrication, as a whole range of writers from Amin27 to Bernal28 have recently emphasized, and that any Aeschylus-to-Kissinger narrative is therefore also equally a fabrication (or a fabricated reflection of a prior fabrication), is something that does not seem to have occurred to Said. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 335

77.Aijaz Ahmad, and before him Sadiq Jalal al-Azm, have critiqued Said for homogenizing the West, and for presenting all work about the East done in the West as being necessarily influenced by Orientalism. Al-Azm, one of the first to advance this argument, contended that while Said sought to challenge the ways in which Orientalists ascribe an essential nature to the East and West, which makes them not only ontologically different but that renders one superior to another, Said was himself guilty of essentializing the West. By tracing Orientalist attitudes all the way back to Homer, Said seems to suggest that there is something inherent in knowledge production in the West that renders it Orientalist. Additionally, even though one of Said’s definitions of Orientalism is as a thoroughly modern phenomenon, his other definitions and his grand sweep of references muddy the historical context and the specificity of Orientalist modes of thought. Such a sweep that compares discourses produced in the capitalist and pre-capitalist eras, Ahmed argued, is one that even Foucault would have objected to. … Such a unilinear, essentialist and idealist understanding of Orientalism does not, al-Azm argues, serve Said well in his attempt to find an approach to how one might study other cultures and peoples in a non-repressive manner. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 872

Categorization

  • XREF: The ‘Athens-to-Albion Europe as recent fabrication’ point reinforces the earlier chapter’s claim about civilizational maps being historically contingent constructions. — connects to: Said’s critique mirrored Orientalism by fixating on Western metropolitan culture — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 104; Said’s critique reified Orientalism as a category masking deeper structures — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 523; Edward Said’s own critique essentialized the West (+5 more)
  • DEFINE: Introduces el-Azm’s coinage ‘Orientalist-in-reverse’ as a diagnostic label for Said’s own procedure.
  • QUESTION: Worth chasing: does the al-Azm/Foucault objection apply equally to contemporary scholarship racializing whiteness as a monolith?
  • corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 335; Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 872

Broader Connections

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