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III.
Orientalism
and Beyond
I will long remember the day I read
Orientalism
. . . .
For me, a child of a
successful anti-colonial struggle,
Orientalism
was a book which talked of
things I felt I had known all along but had
never found the language to formulate with
clarity. Like many great books it seemed to
say to me for the first time what one had
always wanted to say.
—
Partha Chatterjee (1992: 194)
In order to appreciate
Orientalism
and its impact on the
production of knowledge in the West, we must first situate the
book within its proper context. Said’s project largely stems from
the problem of representation and the inferior image that the West
has projected onto its other. This distorted image is the product of a
diverse body of textual knowledge affiliated with French and
British colonialism. Historically, such knowledge was utilized for
defining not only how the West saw other cultures but how it
viewed itself as well. In other words, the self-perception of the West
was mutually constitutive in that it depended on the existence of an
other to compare or contrast itself with. Therefore, what Said set
out to write was a critique against a discourse that had largely
remained unchallenged since its beginnings. Although Said, as much
as his critics, was aware of
Orientalism
’s “theoretical
inconsistencies” (1994a: 339), the fact that his writing is sprinkled
with a detailed reading of history and sociopolitical analysis
indicates that his priority was not so much in constructing a
“theory” of Orientalism than in developing a way to counteract and
refute a “real” body of knowledge with firm historical roots and
consequences. Or, as Said concluded in his 1994 afterword,
“
Orientalism
is a partisan work, not a theoretical machine” (339).