Everything about Orientalism totally explained
Orientalism refers to the imitation or depiction of aspects of
Eastern cultures in the West by writers, designers and artists, and can also refer to a sympathetic stance towards the region by a writer or other person. An "Orientalist" may be a person engaged in these activities, but is also the traditional term for any scholar of
Oriental studies.
These meanings were given a new twist by
Edward Said in his controversial 1978 book
Orientalism, where he uses the term to describe a tradition, both academic and artistic, of hostile and deprecatory views of the East by the West, shaped by the attitudes of the era of European
imperialism in the
18th and
19th centuries. When used in this sense, it often implies essentializing and prejudiced outsider interpretations of Eastern cultures and peoples. Said was critical of this scholarly tradition and also of a few modern scholars, including
Princeton University professor
Bernard Lewis. In contrast, the term has also been used by some modern scholars to refer to writers of the Imperialist era who had pro-Eastern attitudes, as opposed to those who saw nothing of value in non-Western cultures.
Meaning of the term
Like the term
Orient,
Orientalism derives from the Latin word
oriens (rising) and, equally likely, from the Greek word ('he'oros', the direction of the rising sun). "Orient" is the opposite of
Occident. In terms of The
Old World,
Europe was considered
The Occident (The West), and its farthest-known extreme
The Orient (The East). Dating from the Roman Empire until the Middle Ages, what is now, in the West, considered 'the
Middle East' was then considered 'the Orient'. In that time, the flourishing cultures of the
Far East were unknown, likewise Europe was unknown in the Far East.
In time, the common understanding of 'the Orient' has continually shifted eastwards, as Western explorers traveled farther in to Asia. In Biblical times, the
Three Wise Men 'from the Orient' were actually
Magi from "The East", (relative to Judea), probably meaning the
Persian Empire or
Arabia. After a period, as Europe learned of countries farther East, the defined limit of 'the Orient' shifted eastwards, until it reached the Pacific Ocean, in what Westerners came to call 'the
Far East'. In the West, these shifts in time confuse the scope (historical and geographic) of Oriental Studies.
Yet, there remain contexts where 'the Orient' and 'Oriental' denote older definitions, for example 'Oriental spices' typically are from the Earth's regions extending from the Middle East to sub-continental India to Indo-China. Moreover, travel on the
Orient Express train (
Paris–
Istanbul), is eastward (to the sun), but doesn't reach what is currently understood to be
the Orient.
In contemporary English,
Oriental is usually synonymous for the peoples, cultures, and goods from the parts of
East Asia traditionally occupied by
East Asians and
Southeast Asians racially categorised as "
Mongoloid". This excludes
Indians, Arabs, and the other West Asian peoples. In some parts of the United States, the term is considered derogatory; for example, Washington state prohibits use of the word "Oriental" in legislation and government documentation, preferring the word "Asian" instead.
Orientalism in the arts
Imitations of Oriental styles
Orientalism has also come to mean the adoption of typical eastern motifs, styles and subject matter in art, architecture, and design.
Turquerie was the oldest such fashion, which began as early as the late 15th century, and continued until at least the 18th.
Early use in architecture of motifs lifted from the Indian subcontinent have sometimes been called "
Hindoo style." One of the earliest examples can be seen in the façade of
Guildhall, London (1788–1789) and the style gained momentum in the west with the publication of the various views of India by
William Hodges and
the Daniells from about 1795. One of the finest examples of "Hindoo" architecture is
Sezincote House (c. 1805) in
Gloucestershire. Other notable buildings using the Hindoo style of Orientalism are
Casa Loma in
Toronto,
Sanssouci in
Potsdam, and
Wilhelma in
Stuttgart.
Chinoiserie is the catch-all term for the fashion for Chinese themes in decoration in Western Europe, beginning in the late 17th century and peaking in waves, especially
Rococo Chinoiserie,
ca 1740–1770. From the
Renaissance to the 18th century Western designers attempted to imitate the technical sophistication of Chinese ceramics with only partial success. Early hints of Chinoiserie appear, in the 17th century, in the nations with active East India companies: England (the
British East India Company), Denmark (the
Danish East India Company), Holland (the
Dutch East India Company) and France (the
French East India Company). Tin-glazed pottery made at
Delft and other Dutch towns adopted genuine
blue-and-white Ming decoration from the early 17th century, and early ceramic wares at
Meissen and other centers of true
porcelain imitated Chinese shapes for dishes, vases and
teawares (see
Chinese export porcelain).
Pleasure pavilions in "Chinese taste" appeared in the formal parterres of late Baroque and Rococo German palaces, and in tile panels at
Aranjuez near
Madrid.
Thomas Chippendale's mahogany tea tables and china cabinets, especially, were embellished with fretwork glazing and railings,
ca 1753–70, but sober
homages to early Xing scholars' furnishings were also naturalized, as the
tang evolved into a mid-Georgian side table and squared slat-back armchairs suited English gentlemen as well as Chinese scholars. Not every adaptation of Chinese design principles falls within mainstream "chinoiserie." Chinoiserie media included imitations of lacquer and painted tin (tôle) ware that imitated japanning, early painted wallpapers in sheets, and ceramic figurines and table ornaments. Small
pagodas appeared on chimneypieces and full-sized ones in gardens.
Kew has a magnificent garden pagoda designed by Sir
William Chambers.
After 1860,
Japonisme, sparked by the arrival of
Japanese woodblock prints, became an important influence in the western arts in particular on many modern French artists such as
Monet. The paintings of
James McNeill Whistler and his "
Peacock Room" are some of the finest works of the genre; other examples include the
Gamble House and other buildings by California architects
Greene and Greene.
Depictions of the Orient in art and literature
Depictions of Islamic "
Moors" and "Turks" (imprecisely named Muslim groups of North Africa and West Asia) can be found in Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque art. The first stirrings of Orientalism in Western art are found in Biblical scenes in
Early Netherlandish painting, where secondary figures, especially Roman and Jewish ones, are given exotic costumes that distantly reflect the
turbans and other clothes of the contemporary
Near East. The
Three Magi in
Nativity scenes were an especial focus for this. Renaissance
Venice had a phase of particular interest in depictions of the
Ottoman Empire in painting;
Gentile Bellini, who travelled to
Constantinople and painted the Sultan, and
Vittore Carpaccio were the leading exponents. By then the depictions were rather more accurate, with men typically dressed all in white.
In the nineteenth century the numbers of Oriental scenes greatly increased. In many of these works the myth of the Orient as exotic and decadently corrupt is most fully articulated. Such works typically concentrated on Near-Eastern Islamic cultures. Artists such as
Eugène Delacroix,
Jean-Léon Gérôme and
Alexander Roubtzoff painted many depictions of Islamic culture, often including lounging
odalisques, and stressing lassitude and visual spectacle. When
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, director of the French
Académie de peinture painted a highly-colored vision of a
turkish bath (
illustration, right), he made his eroticized Orient publicly acceptable by his diffuse generalizing of the female forms, who might all have been of the same model. If his painting had simply been retitled "In a Paris Brothel," it would have been far less acceptable. Sensuality was seen as acceptable in the exotic Orient. This orientalizing imagery persisted in art into the early 20th century, as evidenced in
Matisse's orientalist nudes. In these works the "Orient" often functions as a mirror to Western culture itself, or as a way of expressing its hidden or illicit aspects. In
Gustave Flaubert's novel
Salammbô ancient
Carthage in North Africa is used as a
foil to ancient
Rome. Its culture is portrayed as morally corrupting and suffused with dangerously alluring eroticism. This novel proved hugely influential on later portrayals of ancient
Semitic cultures.
The use of the orient as an exotic backdrop continued in the movies for instance in many movies with
Rudolph Valentino. Later the rich Arab in robes became a more popular theme, especially during the oil crisis of the 1970s. In the 1990s the Arab terrorist became a common villain figure in Western movies.
Examples of Orientalism in the arts
Literature
Opera, ballets, musicals
Jean-Philippe Rameau — Les Indes Galantes (1735–1736)
Jacques Offenbach — Ba-ta-clan (1855)
Georges Bizet — Les Pêcheurs de Perles (1863)
Alexander Borodin — Prince Igor (1890)
César Cui — The Mandarin's Son (1878)
Gilbert and Sullivan — The Mikado (1885)
Pietro Mascagni — Iris (1899)
Giacomo Puccini — Madama Butterfly (1904), Turandot (1926)
Rogers and Hammerstein — The King And I (1951)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart — Die Entführung aus dem Serail (1782)
Georg Friedrich Händel — Tamerlano (1724) and Serse (1738)
Richard Strauss — Salome, Opera in one act based on Wilde's play (1905)
Richard Strauss — The Egyptian Helen, Opera with libretto by Hugo von Hofmanstahl (1929)
Gioachino Rossini — Semiramide (1823)
Giuseppe Verdi — Nabucco (1842) and Aida (1871)
Orchestral works
Mily Balakirev' — Tamara.
Alexander Borodin — In the Steppes of Central Asia; "Polovetsian Dances" from Prince Igor.
Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov — Caucasian Sketches.
Modest Mussorgsky — "Dance of the Persian Slaves" from Khovanshchina.
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov — Antar; Scheherezade.
Shorter musical pieces
Mili Balakirev — Islamey
Albert Ketèlbey — In a Persian Market (1920), In a Chinese Temple Garden (1925), and In the Mystic Land of Egypt (1931)
Sergei Rachmaninoff — Oriental Sketch
Theatre
Tobias Bamberg's magic stage act as "Okito" (Germany, 1893 - United States, 1908)
Oscar Wilde's Salomé (1893, first performed in Paris 1896)
Alexander's mentalism stage act (United States, c. 1890s - 1910s)
William Ellsworth Robinson's, magic stage act as "Chung Ling Soo" (United States, 1900 - 1918)
Painting
Théodore Chassériau (1819-1856)
Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863)
Ludwig Deutsch (1855-1935)
Alphonse Etienne Dinet
Edmund Dulac
Eugène Fromentin (1820-1876)
Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904)
William Holman Hunt (1827-1910)
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780–1867)
John Frederick Lewis (1805-1876)
Théodore Ralli (1852-1909)
David Roberts (painter) (1796-1864)
Alexandre Roubtzoff (1884–1949)
James Tissot (1836-1902)
Horace Vernet
Photography
Roger Fenton
Francis Frith
Films
The Sheik (film) (1921)
Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935)
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)
Edward Said and "Orientalism"
Edward Said is that Western knowledge about the East isn't generated from facts, but through imagined constructs that see all "Eastern" societies as fundamentally similar, all sharing crucial characteristics unlike those of "Western" societies, thus, this ‘a priori’ knowledge established the East as antithetical to the West. Such Eastern knowledge is constructed with literary texts and historical records that often are of limited understanding of the facts of life in the Middle East.
Before Said's book, "Oriental" was widely used as the opposite of "occidental" ('Western'). The comparisons between them generally were unfavorable to the Orient, however, respected institutions like the Oriental Institute of Chicago, the London School of Oriental and African Studies or Università degli studi di Napoli L'Orientale, carried the term with no explicit reproach. The word "Orient" fell into disrepute after the word "Orientalism" was coined with the publication of Said's book. Following the ideas of Michel Foucault, Said emphasized the relationship between power and knowledge in scholarly and popular thinking, in particular regarding European views of the Islamic Arab world. Said argued that Orient and Occident worked as oppositional terms, so that the "Orient" was constructed as a negative inversion of Western culture. The work of another thinker, Antonio Gramsci, was also important in shaping Edward Said's analysis in this area. In particular, Said can be seen to have been influenced by Gramsci's notion of hegemony in understanding the pervasiveness of Orientalist constructs and representations in Western scholarship and reporting, and their relation to the exercise of power over the 'Orient'.
Although Edward Said limited his discussion to academic study of Middle Eastern, African and Asian history and culture, he asserted that "Orientalism is, and doesn't merely represent, a significant dimension of modern political and intellectual culture." (p. 53) Said's discussion of academic Orientalism is almost entirely limited to late 19th and early 20th century scholarship. Most academic Area Studies departments had already abandoned an imperialist or colonialist paradigm of scholarship. He names the work of Bernard Lewis as an example of the continued existence of this paradigm, but acknowledges that it was already somewhat of an exception by the time of his writing (1977).
The idea of an "Orient" is a crucial aspect of attempts to define "the West." Thus, histories of the Greco-Persian Wars may contrast the monarchical government of the Persian Empire with the democratic tradition of Athens, as a way to make a more general comparison between the Greeks and the Persians, and between "the West" and "the East", or "Europe" and "Asia", but make no mention of the other Greek city states, most of which were not ruled democratically.
Taking a comparative and historical literary review of European, mainly British and French, scholars and writers looking at, thinking about, talking about, and writing about the peoples of the Middle East, Said sought to lay bare the relations of power between the colonizer and the colonized in those texts. Said's writings have had far-reaching implications beyond area studies in Middle East, to studies of imperialist Western attitudes to India, China and elsewhere. It was one of the foundational texts of postcolonial studies. Said later developed and modified his ideas in his book Culture and Imperialism (1993).
Many scholars now use Said's work to attempt to overturn long-held, often taken-for-granted Western ideological biases regarding non-Westerners in scholarly thought. Some post-colonial scholars would even say that the West's idea of itself was constructed largely by saying what others were not. If "Europe" evolved out of "Christendom" as the "not-Byzantium," early modern Europe in the late 16th century (see Battle of Lepanto) certainly defined itself as the "not-Turkey."
Said puts forward several definitions of 'Orientalism' in the introduction to Orientalism. Some of these have been more widely quoted and influential than others:
"A way of coming to terms with the Orient that's based on the Orient's special place in European Western experience." (p. 1)
"a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between 'the Orient' and (most of the time) 'the Occident'." (p. 2)
"A Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient." (p. 3)
"...particularly valuable as a sign of European-Atlantic power over the Orient than it's as a veridic discourse about the Orient." (p. 6)
"A distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts." (p. 12)
In his Preface to the 2003 edition of Orientalism, Said also warned against the "falsely unifying rubrics that invent collective identities," citing such terms as "America," "The West," and "Islam," which were leading to what he felt was a manufactured "clash of civilisations."
Criticisms of Said
Critics of Said's theory, such as the historian Bernard Lewis, argue that Said's account contains many factual, methodological and conceptual errors. Said ignores many genuine contributions to the study of Eastern cultures made by Westerners during the Enlightenment and Victorian eras. Said's theory doesn't explain why the French and English pursued the study of Islam in the 16th and 17th centuries, long before they'd any control or hope of control in the Middle East. He has been criticised for ignoring the contributions of Italian, Dutch, and particularly the massive contribution of German scholars. Lewis claims that the scholarship of these nations was more important to European Orientalism than the French or British, but the countries in question either had no colonial projects in the Mideast (Dutch and Germans), or no connection between their Orientalist research and their colonialism (Italians). Said's theory also doesn't explain why much of Orientalist study did nothing to advance the cause of imperialism. As Lewis asks, "What imperial purpose was served by deciphering the ancient Egyptian language, for example, and then restoring to the Egyptians knowledge of and pride in their forgotten, ancient past?"
Lewis argued that Orientalism arose from humanism, which was distinct from Imperialist ideology, and sometimes in opposition to it. Orientalist study of Islam arose from the rejection of religious dogma, and was an important spur to discovery of alternative cultures. Lewis criticised as "intellectual protectionism" the argument that only those within a culture could usefully discuss it.
In his rebuttal to Lewis, Said stated that Lewis' negative rejoinder must be placed into its proper context. Since one of Said's principal arguments is that Orientalism was used (wittingly or unwittingly) as an instrument of empire, he contends that Lewis' critique of this thesis could hardly be judged in the disinterested, scholarly light that Lewis would like to present himself, but must be understood in the proper knowledge of what Said claimed was Lewis' own (often masked) neo-imperialist proclivities, as displayed by the latter's political or quasi-political appointments and pronouncements.
Specifically, Lewis is aligned with prominent think tanks that promote neoconservative views on U.S. Middle East Policy. Most scholars in Middle Eastern Studies departments at American and European universities take a position much closer to Said's than to Lewis', and scholars at certain privately-funded think tanks, such as Martin Kramer at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Daniel Pipes at the Middle East Forum, who are aligned with Lewis, have alleged that this constitutes bias, and is a reason to cut federal funding from these Middle Eastern Studies departments, and subject all such academic departments to federal government oversight in order to prevent scholarly bias. Pipes is the author of a website, campuswatch.org, which encourages students to report bias on the part of their professors.
Bryan Turner critiques Said’s work saying there were a multiplicity of forms and traditions of Orientalism. He is therefore critical of Said’s attempt to try to place them all under the framework of the orientalist tradition. Other critics of Said have argued that while many distortions and fantasies certainly existed, the notion of "the Orient" as a negative mirror image of the West can't be wholly true because attitudes to distinct cultures diverged significantly. In any case it's a logical necessity that other cultures will be identified as "different", since otherwise their distinctive characteristics would be invisible, and that the most striking differences will hold up the mirror to the observing culture.
John MacKenzie notes that Said’s Orientalism is critiqued for implying that western dominance is and has been unchallenged, ignoring for example the ‘Subaltern Studies’ group of scholars work of resistance and giving voice to the unvoiced. Further criticism includes the observation that the criticisms levied by Said at Orientalist scholars of being essentialist can in turn be levied at him for the way in which he writes of the west as a hegemonic mass, stereotyping its characteristics.
A mirror image: Eastern views of the West
In an enlightening contrast, many of the essentially dismissive and patronizing concepts associated with Western "Orientalism" as expressed above are summed up — but in reverse orientation — in the epilogue to the "Chapter on the Western Regions" according to the Hou Hanshu. This is the official history of the Later (or "Eastern") Han Dynasty (25-221 CE). The book was compiled by Fan Ye, (died 445 CE), and it succinctly expresses the Han opinion of the Western Hu culture (in what is now western China):
» The Western Hu are far away.
They live in an outer zone.
» Their countries' products are beautiful and precious,
But their character is debauched and frivolous.
» They don't follow the rites of China.
Han has the canonical books.
» They don't obey the Way of the Gods.
» How pitiful!
» How obstinate!
Derogatory or stereotyped portrayals of Westerners appear in many works of Indian, Chinese and Japanese artists.
In contrast, some Eastern artists adopted and adapted Western styles. The Indian painter Ravi Varma painted several works that are virtually indistinguishable from some Western orientalist images. In the late 20th century many Western cultural themes and images began appearing in Asian art and culture, especially in Japan. English words and phrases are prominent in Japanese advertising and popular culture, and many Japanese anime are written around characters, settings, themes, and mythological figures derived from various Western cultural traditions.
Recently, the term Occidentalism has been coined to refer to negative views of the Western world sometimes found in Eastern societies today. In a similar ideological vein to Occidentalism, Eurocentrism can refer to both negative views and excessively positive views of the Western World found in discussions about 'Eastern culture'.
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