This is the Orient that has been active in Western imagination since Greek times; the Orient conveyed by expressions like Oriental despotism, or Marx's Oriental mode of production (1978, pp. 31-32). It is Said's parametric quantity that this Orient has not simply been active in the Western imagination, but has been constructed, or reconstructed by a Western imagination that was in turn an instrument of imperialism. Thus for example he quotes the wrangle of Arthur James Balfour (he of the Balfour Declaration that established British policy in Palestine):
Western nations as soon as they emerge into narrative show the beginnings of those capacities for self-government... [but] never in all the revolutions of fate and set have you seen one of those [Oriental] nations of its own motion establish what we, from a Western point of view, call self- government (quoted in Said, 1998, pp. 32-33).
such(prenominal) was the sort of assumed, or constructed, contrast made by Orientalism that was vomit up to the service of imperial projects. Said does not assert that all Orientalist intellectual was a conscious agent of imperialism, but he argues that Orientalist studies were inevitably infused with imperial concerns, just as Soviet studies were infused with rimy War concerns.
A further note must be made, that Said is himself a Palestinian-American, and that th
It is doubtless too soon to merely write Islamic combativeness off as a spent force. As Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, cited earlier, observes, the wholly structure of global politics shows signs of shifting away from unproblematic national lines to a more complex structure of overlapping legitimacies, a possibility explored by Hedley Bull as proterozoic as 1977 under the term "neomedievalism" (Rudolph, 1997, p. 9). But the general argument put forth by Olivier Roy seems on the whole support by developments in the years since he wrote it.
Fault lines in the midst of militant Muslims and non-Muslims, or between different groups of Muslims, may bet in unexpected places, but the prospect of a capacious Islamist upheaval throughout the Muslim world seems to have receded, payable in large measure to the inherent contradictions of the Islamist militant agenda.
T.M. Greene does the more or less thorough job, in the space of review excerpts, of outlining both the issues elevated by Said and (as quoted above) the problematic element of Said's own dry land and perspective. On the former, Green writes that "the venom of Orientalist ethnocentrism ... is still at realise today, poisoning public and private, popular and academic attitudes in ship canal which Said documents at length" (1979). The "anthology of overbearing observations, analyses, and 'explanations' of non-European cultures ... makes for painful translation" (1979). In fact, the Western reader will find more to be embarrassed about, or worse, in Said's pages.
Hayford, E. R. (1978). [Review of the bear Orientalism]. depository library Journal, 103, 2241. Reprinted in Book Review Digest, 1979. (1980). (pp. 1105-6). New York: H. W. Wilson.
Said, E. W. (1978). Orientalism. New York: random House.
Foucault and discourse theory are prominent in contemporaneous literary studies, and have spread to other disciplines as well. However, the improve but nonspecialist public is likely to be hazy at best on these concepts, and in general much of the book has
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