Edward Said on Orientalism

 Hello Readers ! 

           Welcome to my blog. This is my academic blog activity given by Dr. Dilip Barad sir. So the task is to watch an interview with Edward Said on Orientalism and the second video is about the Israel - Palestine issue. It's reflective writing on these two videos. 

( Click here to watch an interview….)

 

                    EDWARD SAID

On ‘Orientalism’

Executive Producer & Director: Sut Jhally

Producer & Editor: Sanjay Talreja

Assistant Editor: Jeremy Smith

             Featuring an interview with Edward Said Professor, Columbia University and author of Orientalism.

         In this interview we find Edward Said who explains his thoughts on Orientalism and he gives various interesting arguments also. Sut Jhally has mentioned in the introductory part that :       Orientalism tries to answer the question of why, when we think of the Middle East for example, we have a preconceived notion that is given by our media or any political power. That is what kind of people live there, what they believe, how they act. Even though we may never have been there, or indeed even met anyone from there. More generally Orientalism asks, how do we come to understand people, strangers, who look different to us by virtue of the color of their skin? It is interesting to study in our life also how we think about particular regions of people.

        And also Edward Said argues that how Europe, the west and the U.S. look at the countries of the Middle East. In which lens they look at the people and particular land. It is not true but it might be a stereotype they have in their minds. He calls this lens through which we view that part of the world Orientalism, a framework that we use to understand the unfamiliar and the strange; to make the peoples of the Middle East appear different and threatening.

       Here I would like to mention Edward Said's own words in the interview. He was giving two reasons for his interest in Orientalism.

EDWARD SAID: My interest in Orientalism began for two reasons, one it was an immediate thing, that is to say, the Arab-Israeli War of 1973, which had been preceded by a lot of images and discussions in the media in the popular press about how the Arabs are cowardly and they don't know how to fight and they are always going to be beaten because they are not modern. And then everybody was very surprised when the Egyptian army crossed the canal in early October of 1973 and demonstrated that like anybody else they could fight. That was one immediate impulse.

   

        And the second one, which has a much longer history in my own life was the constant sort of disparity I felt between what my experience of being an Arab was, and the representations of that that one saw in art. I'm talking about very great artists, you know,like Delacroix and Ang and Gerome and people like that, novelists who wrote about the Orient like Disraeli or Flaubert and you know the fact that those representations of the Orient had very little to do with what I knew about my own background in life. So I decided to write the history of that.

The reason's are very interesting one. 

   There are also various examples of movies and news channels. How the media creates monsters and heroes. How manipulated the audience and the whole country. That is noticed here. We also add this one also how the media and films projected a nation and its perspectives.

         " And it seemed to me that there was a kind of repertory of images that kept coming up: The sensual woman who is there to be sort of used by the man, the East as a kind of mysterious place full of secrets and monsters, you know,  “the marvels of the East,” was a phrase that was used. "

         Here we can find that Said makes the point that the one way of looking at a particular thing that is not valuable you can say that is unfair.  Because what is the actual image of the East and what is projected by the West. That is problematic.

      In the same way the East projected West that is also not fair. How the stereotypes emerged in our minds and society. How we stereotyping a black people. We could not have any barrier with them or any issue with them. Then even our T.V. serials and films show insecurities towards black people.

         ' Orientalism and empire ' in which we find that after Napoleon came to Egypt in 1798. It's the first really modern imperial expedition. So he invades the place but he doesn't invade it the way the Spaniards invaded the New World, looking for

loot.

" He comes instead with an enormous army of soldiers but also scientists, botanists, architects, philologists, biologists, historians, whose job it was to record Egypt in every conceivable way. "

      He counted everything for european men. It's a new kind of imperialism.

       There is also a reference of American  Orientalism and ORIENTALISM TODAY – The Demonization of Islam in the News and Popular Culture and various examples are their. 

           Said also throws light on the issue of Palestine. In that area two kinds of people live and struggle, Arads and Jews. Because of the differentiation in religion they conflict and struggle a lot. Said is also a very prominent and active representative of the Palestinian people. Said grew up in what was then called Palestine and is now called Israel and the Occupied Territories. When the State of Israel was founded in 1948, like millions of other Palestinians, Said and his family were made homeless as well as stateless. These exiled Palestinians now mostly live, either in the territories under the control of Israel or in refugee camps in the surrounding countries. One of the things that drives Said is the quest for justice and a homeland for the Palestinian people.

References :

• “Edward Said on Orientalism.” MEDIA EDUCATION FOUNDATION TRANSCRIPT, Sut Jhally, 2005, www.mediaed.org/transcripts/Edward-Said-On-Orientalism-Transcript.pdf. 

Thank you....