Assignment on Orientalism

Name : Chauhan Hetal M

Course: M.A English

Paper No. :11

Paper Name : Postcolonial Studies

Semester:03

Roll No.:14

Email Id: hetalchauhan137@gmail.com

Submitted To: Dr. Dilip Barad,Smt.S.B.Gardi,Department Of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji, Bhavnagar University.

v  Orientalism:-

   Orientalism by Edward W. Said is a study of the investigation of the Orient and its belief system. Said analyzes the recorded, social, and political perspectives of the East that are held by the West, and looks at how they created and where they originated from. He essentially follows the different perspectives and observations back to the pioneer time of British and European control in the Middle East. During this period, the United States was not yet a force to be reckoned with and didn't go into anything in the East yet. The perspectives and observations that appeared were fundamentally the after effect of the British and French. The British had settlements in the East right now; the French did not but rather were attempting to secure a few.

Said recognizes a progression of presumptions that are made by the West about the Orient. Said himself is Palestinian, and he recognizes a progression of suspicions that the West makes about Arabs: they are unreasonable, hostile to western, threatening and deceptive. He investigates how these presumptions are built contrary to what the West thinks about themselves, and subsequently characterizes this anticipated picture of "Middle Easterners" in the psyche of Westerners as the other we characterize the other by what we are most certainly not. The peril is that these presumptions come to be dealt with as truth and along these lines affect our relations and our belief systems.

·       What is Occident?

The occident deals with the West countries (West means the countries of Europe, America, and France). Occident derives from the latin word Occidens. Occident means the hemisphere that includes North America and South America = New world or Western hemisphere.

·       What is Orient?

The orient almost a European invention had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experience. The term ‘Orient’ is derives from the Latin word ‘oriens’ is meaning ‘East’. Orient is depends on the logic of discourse. Orients are incapable of change they are static. Orients are incapable of change they are static.

The relationship between Orient and Occident and is a relationship of power and domination.

                                           What is Orientalism?

o   The country of the east especially East Asia.

o   Study of orient means a study of orients.

o   Old civilization with an old knowledge system.

o   Problem between White and Muslim people.

o   A story of Middle-East.

o   Strangers by the fortune of colors.

o   Identities are not made naturally.

o   Post Structuralism has changed way of thinking.

o   Subjective and objective process.

o   Orientalism is generally means to a mental exercise and mental archrival.

The “East” as differentiated from the “West”, which includes the Middle East, Near East, Central Asia, South Asia and the Far East, is today top of mind with news breaking in a stream of anxiety, fear, economic and political pressures, social conflict, unrest and war.

In the Introduction part Said divided into three parts,

•      Chapter 1: The Scope of Orientalism

•      Chapter 2: Orientalist Structures and Restructures

•      Chapter 3: Orientalism now

 1)The Scope of Orientalism,

The distinction between pure and political knowledge:

It is anything but difficult to contend that information about Shakespeare or words worth is not political while learning about contemporary china or the Soviet Union is. Humanist who expounds on words worth, or an Editor whose Specialty is Keats, is not included in anything political is that he does appears to have no direct political impact upon reality in the regular sense. The deciding impingement on most learning created in the contemporary west is that it be non political, above factional or little disapproved of doctrinal conviction. Who produces it, yet this information is not consequently naturally non-political. Political centrality is an expansive question that I have attempted to treat in some detail somewhere else. What I am keen on doing now is recommending how the general liberal accord that "genuine" learning is on a very basic level non political.( and on the other hand, that plainly political information is not genuine information.) clouds the profoundly it unclearly sorted out political conditions getting when information is delivered. Orientalism is not minor political topic or field that is reflected inactively by culture, grant, or institutions; nor is it an extensive and diffuse accumulation of content about the orient: nor is illustrative and expressive of some loathsome "western" settler plot to hold down the "orient" world. It is fairly a dispersion of geopolitical and philological remaking, mental investigation, scene and sociological muddle it makes as well as maintains; it is, as opposed to express. A creation will or cases to control, control, even to consolidate, what is a plainly extraordinary world; it is most importantly, a talk that is in no way, shape or form in immediate, relating association with political power in the crude, yet rather is delivered and exists in an uneven trade with different sorts of force, melded to a degree by the trade with power political (as with pilgrim or magnificent foundation), control scholarly as with ruling since like similar Linguistics or life systems, or any of the present day approach since power social (as with orthodoxies and groups of taste, writings, values) control moral (as with thoughts regarding what "we" do and what "they" can't do or comprehend as "we" do). Oreintalism is and does not just speak to a significant measurement of current political scholarly culture, and accordingly has less to do with the orient than it does with "our" reality. "orientalism is a social and a political truth," then, it doesn't exist in some recorded vacuum; an incredible opposite, I think it can be demonstrated that what is thought, said or even done in regards to the orient takes after certain particular and mentally learning lines.

2)The methodological question:

Examination to the methodological significance for work in the human sciences of finding and planning an initial step, a state of takeoff a starting standard Learned and attempted to present was that there is no such thing as a just given or essentially accessible, striating focuses: beginnings must be made for every venture in such away as to empower what takes after from them. The Anglo French American experience of the Arab and Islam, which for very nearly a thousand years together remained for the Orient. Instantly after doing that a huge part of the Orient appeared to have been dispensed with India, Japan, china and different segments of the Far East not on the grounds that these districts were not vital but rather in light of the fact that one could talk about Europe's experience of the Near Orient, or of Islam, aside from its experience of the Far Orient.

3)  The personal dimension:

The individual interest in this study gets from my mindfulness kid experiencing childhood in two British provinces. From multiple points of view investigation of orientalism has been an endeavour to stock the follows upon me, the oriental subject, of the way of life whose control has been so intense a figure the life of all Orientals. In the Prison Notebooks Gramsci says: "The beginning stage of basic elaboration is the cognizance of what one truly is, and knows thyself as a result of the verifiable procedure to date… .." Much of the individual interest in this study gets from my attention to being an "Oriental "as a youngster experiencing childhood in two British settlements.

Ø  Orientalist Structures and Restructures

Structure of Orientalism is nothing more than a structure of lies or of myths.   In this section Said outlines how Orientalist discourse was move from Country to Country and Political leader to author. He advises that this discourse was set up as a foundation for all further study and discourse of the Orient by the occident. The construction of identity — for identity, whether of Orient or Occident, France or Britain, whiles obviously a repository of distinct collective experiences. Edward Said points the slight change on the attitude of the Europeans towards the Orientals.

Ø  Orientalism now

Orientalism can also express the strength of the West and the Orient’s weaknesses seen by West. Such strength and such weakness are as intrinsic to Orientalism as they are to any view that divides the world into large. General divisions, entities that Coexist in a state of tension produced by what is believed to be radical difference.

Academic points of  view that,  The interchange between the academic and the more or less imaginative meaning of orientalism is a constant one, and since the late eighteenth  century there has been a considerable, quite disciplined perhaps even regulated traffic between two.

In the first place it would be wrong to conclude that the orient was essentially an idea or a creation with no corresponding reality. A second qualification is that ideas, culture, and histories cannot seriously be understood or studied without their force, or more precisely their configuration of power, also being studied. 

Orientalism and the arts

Imitations of Oriental style

Edward Blore's Alupka Palace (1828–46) was one of the earliest intimations of the Victorian taste for Moorish Revival architecture.

Orientalism has also come to mean the use or reference of typical eastern motifs and styles in art, architecture, and design.

Early use of motifs lifted from the Indian subcontinent have sometimes been called "Hindoo style," one of the earliest examples being the façade of Guildhall, London (1788–1789). The style gained momentum in the west with the publication of the various views of India by William Hodges and William Daniell and Thomas Daniell 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.


Chinesischer Turm in the Englischer Garten of  Munich. Initial structure built 1789–1790.
Chinoiserie is the catch-all term for decorations involving Chinese themes in Western Europe, beginning in the late seventeenth century and peaking in waves, especially Rococo Chinoiserie, ca 1740–1770. From the Renaissance to the eighteenth century Western designers attempted to imitate the technical sophistication of Chinese ceramics with only partial success. Early hints of Chinoiserie appear, in the seventeenth century, in the nations with active East India companies such as England, Denmark, Holland, and France. Tin-glazed pottery made at Delft and other Dutch towns adopted genuine blue-and-white Ming decoration from the early seventeenth century, and early ceramic wares at Meissen and other centers of true porcelain imitated Chinese shapes for dishes, vases, and teawares.
After 1860, Japonaiserise , 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 Claude Monet. The paintings of James McNeil 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.