EDWARD SAID
Edward Said is a pioneer of postcolonial studies and also the ‘father of postcolonialism’. He
confronted the tradition of critical theory with the challenge of reflection on himself and the
epistemological anchoring in the ruling states of the North Atlantic. The Frankfurter School,
the French theorists or the Anglo-Saxon cultural theory remained amazedly silent regarding
racist theory, anti-imperialist resistance, and opposition practice. Said’s “Orientalism” is the
foundational work on which postcolonial literary theory developed. Orientalism, in Edward
Said’s view, was a term representing false assumptions underlying Western attitudes toward
the Orient (East). His book, Orientalism, highlighted a “subtle and persistent Eurocentric
prejudice against Arabo-Islamic people and their culture.” Said contended that Europe had
politically dominated Asia for a long time. Due to which, Western texts, even the most
outwardly objective ones, became biased. It was a fact which, in Said’s view, even the most
Western scholars could not recognize.
However, Said’s contention was not only that the West had conquered the East politically.
But, he also contended over the Western scholarship. In his view, it was Western scholars
who appropriated the interpretation and exploration of the Orient’s history, its languages and
culture for themselves. They wrote about the Orient’s past and constructed its modern
identities from a perspective that took Europe as the norm, from which the ‘exotic’ and
‘enigmatic’ Orient deviated. Said bluntly challenged what Western scholars traditionally
referred to as ‘Orientalism.’ He considered Orientalism to be an entrenched structure of
thought, a pattern of making certain generalizations about the part of the world known as
‘East’.
In the book “Orientalism” he described the practice of othering, the making of an identity of
others. Said’s theory of postcolonialism specifically brought into consideration the false
image of the Orient (East). This image, according to Said, was mainly constructed by
Western scholars, philosophers, economists, political theorists, imperial administrators,
novelists and poets since Napoleon’s occupation of Egypt in 1798. The West constructed the
Orient to justify their colonial rule.
Said also identified various assumptions the West made about the Orient. That is, the Orient
is irrational, anti-Western, menacing and dishonest. In his theory, he explored how these
assumptions were constructed in opposition to what the West thought about themselves and
therefore defined this projected image of ‘Arabs’ in the mind of Westerners as the ‘other’.
The danger was that, in Said’s view, these assumptions became treated as truth and therefore
had a great impact on relations and ideologies. Said called for a new treatment of ‘the Orient’.
That is, allowing for self-representation of authors belonging to the Orient rather than
depending on second hand representation.
Said's name came to light when his book Orientalism was published in 1978 and laid the
ground for the theory of postcolonialism, sparking a storm of controversy, which didn't die
with Said's decease. Said's theory of postcolonialism is mainly based on what he considers
the false image of the Orient or the East that has been fabricated by western explorers, poets,
novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators since
Napoleon's occupation of Egypt in 1798. According to Said, these have always shown the
Orient as the primitive, uncivilized "other", in an attempt to create it as the contrast to the
advanced and civilized West. In his highly influential work, Orientalism, Said considers that
"Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction
made between "the Orient" and (most of the time) "the Occident". Said believes that such
discourse has been used either in preparation to military campaigns and colonialism against
the Orient, or as a justification for the occupations and horrors that accompany them. He goes
further, contending that it is quite misleading to consider that such horrors came to an end
with the end of direct colonialism.
On the contrary, he believes that the consequences of colonialism are still persisting in the
form of chaos, coups, corruption, civil wars, and bloodshed, which pervade many of these
countries, mainly because of the residues of colonization. In this respect, Said believes that a
powerful colonizer has imposed a language and a culture, whereas cultures, histories, values,
and languages of the Oriental peoples have been ignored and even distorted by the
colonialists in their pursuit to dominate these peoples and exploit their wealth in the name of
enlightening, civilizing, and even humanizing them. What seems to be so infuriating to Said
is that such peoples, who, in most cases have completely different cultures, have always been
stereotyped by the so-called Orientalists, who so simply cross out all the distinctions and
national characteristics of these diverse cultures. Consequently, the colonial texts have
depicted the Indians, the Egyptians, the Palestinians, the Latin Americans, and many others
as almost the same, the Orient, the "Other", in juxtaposition with "Us", the Occidental.
