A classic is a book which with each rereading offers
as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading
– Italo Calvino

Edward Said’s Orientalism was published by Routledge and Kegan Paul in 1988^[1]. Reading the work 40 years on, one is struck by its undiminished freshness and ongoing significance, and by the conviction that here, to borrow Italo Calvino’s definition^[2], is a classic of our times. What constitutes then that ‘sense of discovery’, now as at ‘the first reading’, which signals Orientalism’s status as a classic?

To begin, there is the force of its thesis. Orientalism, as propounded by Said, was – and remains today – a construction of the ‘Orient’ by the West and for the West. The discourse of scholars, creative writers, artists, journalists, statesmen, politicians, and so on, which was at its most prolific from the 18th century onwards, Orientalism encompasses a vast and diverse field. And as a manner of knowing and having authority over the Orient, it is, in its theory and practices, deeply implicated in the operations of power, domination, and cultural hegemony that govern the relationship between the ‘Occident’ and its projected Other.

Equally impressive today is the geographical and historical scope of Said’s study. While centring upon the West’s relations with the Middle East, in particular ‘the Anglo-French-American experience of the Arabs and Islam’ (p. 17), Orientalism incorporates some other parts of the Eastern world as well, among them India, Indochina (now Vietnam), Indonesia, Japan, China. Of these, the most important from the point of view of Britain is India and its links with Egypt from the later decades of the 19th century to the years following World War II. In its historical reach, Orientalism harks back from the interventions of the United States in Islamic regions in the 1970s to the imperial histories of Britain and France to the era of classical Greece and the conflict between Athens and Persia, as treated in Aeschylus’ The Persians and Euripides’ The Bacchae.

A cultural critic and a historian of ideas, Said’s expertise covers a wide range of disciplinary fields. As he points out, his is a ‘hybrid perspective’: ‘I set out to examine not only scholarly works but also works of literature, political tracts, journalistic texts, travel books, religious and philological studies’ (p. 23). In so doing, Said’s critical engagement, he makes clear, is underpinned throughout by the understanding that ‘no production of knowledge in the human sciences caever ignore or disclaim its author’s involvement as a human subject in his own circumstances’ (p. 23). In other words, to Said, no knowledge can be ‘pure’ and ‘disinterested’, believing as he does that

fields of learning, as much as the works of even the most eccentric artist, are constrained and acted upon by society, by cultural traditions, by worldly circumstance, and by stabilizing influences like schools, libraries, and government; moreover, that both learned and imaginative writings are never free, but are limited in their imagery, assumptions, and intentions; and finally, that the advances made by a “science” like Orientalism in its academic form are less objectively true than we often like to think. (pp. 202-3)

Critical principles such as these lend Said’s interpretation of colonialist texts their poise, circumspection, and inwardness. An example of his strategy as a critic is his analysis of the speech Arthur James Balfour made to the House of Commons in 1910 justifying Britain’s occupation of Egypt.

Excerpting judiciously from Balfour’s speech, Said starts by delineating the personal context out of which Balfour
speaks, pointing to his ‘involvement in imperial affairs’ (p. 31), to his time as Prime Minister, his social status, his educational background, his learning and his wit. Such a context, it is clear, accounts for Balfour’s authority as he sets about positioning Egypt as one Oriental country among ‘all the Oriental countries’ that Britain knows. Implicit in his statements is of course Egypt’s inferiority, because Oriental, which his listeners will be quick to grasp. Furthermore, Said points out, by the repetition in his speech of ‘We know’, and what the phrase intimates of Britain’s power and its right to power, Balfour constructs and takes possession of Egypt with its ‘civilization from its origins to its prime to its decline’ (p. 32); its contemporary backwardness; and its need for order and progress which only Britain and ‘absolute
government’ under Britain can bring about. ‘Is it a good thing for these great nations – I admit their greatness – that this absolute government should be exercised by us? I think it is a good thing’ (p. 33). Moving adroitly therefore from ‘we’ to ‘they’ to ‘I’, the trajectory of Balfour’s address leads up to an assertion of his ability and his right not only to speak for himself as an eminent statesman but also for Britain and the West.

Said’s reading strategy draws attention on the one hand to Balfour’s skillful rhetoric, the confident pace of his argument, and the resounding conclusions he advances relating to Britain’s role in Egypt. On the other hand, it lays open the anxiety that, despite himself, lies below the surface of Balfour’s eloquence.

[D]irectly the native populations have that instinctive feeling that those with whom they have got to deal have not behind them the might, the authority, the sympathy, the full and ungrudging support of the country which sent them there, those populations lose all that sense of order which is the very basis of their civilization, just as our officers lose all that sense of power and authority, which is the very basis of everything they can do for the benefit of those among whom they have been sent. (p. 34)

From the above, it would seem that Britain’s supremacy over Egypt is precariously balanced given the contradictions upon which it rests. While there is military strength and action, and hence its ‘might’and ‘authority’ as an imperial power, there is also its professed moral commitment to the civilising task of empire. While there is to be faced at all times the perfidy of the Egyptians, Orientals who will revolt at the smallest opportunity, there is on the part of the home government a certain ambivalence in their discharge of their military and moral obligations – ‘the full and ungrudging support’ – due to the men serving on the spot. In other words, the tiniest crack in the myth of the empire’s solidarity puts Britain’s ‘power and authority’ in Egypt at risk.

Orientalism has been the subject of much critical attention, whether hostile or sceptically inquiring or laudatory. Many of the questions raised by its commentators revolve around the interpretation of writers and disciplines. The key objection however relates to the homogenising tendencies of Said’s disquisition itself for, as Bart Moore-Gilbert attests in his detailed exposition of the contradictions inherent in the study^[3], the binary oppositions set up between power/powerlessness, coloniser/colonies, lend themselves to a monolithic and essentialised reading of the discourse
of Orientalism. At the same time, the positive and far-reaching impact of Orientalism is undeniable. It has given rise to innovative approaches in the study of the literature of empire, and Said’s own reading and revaluation of such writers as Kipling, Conrad, and Forster are exemplary. In addition, Orientalism’s appearance in 1978 was altogether apt coinciding as it did with the emergence since the mid-1940s of a new field of literatures from countries once colonised by the West. The influence of Said’s study has been crucial in staking out the ground for the critical reception of these literatures that are a vital and distinctive presence in what is now known as postcolonial studies.

Said may have some of the early writers and their works in mind while enlarging in the last chapter of Orientalism on the leverage the discourse continues to have in modern times and with specific reference to the West’s representation of “Islam”. When a poet or novelist, he remarks, ‘writes of his experiences, of his values, of his humanity (however strange that may be), he effectively disrupts the various patterns (images, clichés, abstractions) by which the Orient is represented. A literary text speaks more or less directly of a living reality’ (p. 291). The following are a few examples of the diverse voices of novelists to be heard in the years after World War II and the acts of power they undertake as they write themselves as the subjects of their histories and stories:

I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that this past – with all its imperfections – was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them. (Chinua Achebe, ‘The Novelist as Teacher’, 1964);

I try to think objectively now of the British Empire as one founded accidentally by commercial adventurers, who did the best for themselves, and, when it did not clash with their interests, for the people whom they were ruling. But no amount of objectivity can do away with the fact that self-interest was always paramount. (Shashi Deshpande, ‘Them and Us’, 1993);

I was proud of our revolution [1919] and proud to be a Wafdist. Our top priority was to get rid of foreign rule but democracy was a close second. Egypt was the first country in our century to rise up against European occupation. (Naquib Mahfouz speaking to and quoted in Milton Viorst, Sandcastles: The Arabs in Search of the Modern World, 1995).

Orientalism, says Gayatri Spivak, is ‘the source book in our discipline … The study of colonial discourse, directly released by work such as Said’s, has however blossomed into a garden where the marginalized can speak and be spoken, even spoken for.’^[4] Above all, to read Orientalism today is to hear and discover again, in a world stricken by human and environmental disasters, trade wars, the seductive degradation of knowledge’ (p. 328), Said’s voice – intelligent, learned, humane – and as salutary and needful as when the book first appeared. ⬛

^[1] Edward Said, Orientalism (1978; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1983). Page references are to this edition and included in the text of the essay.
^[2] Italo Calvino, Why Read The Classics?, Trans. Martin Mclaughlin (1991; New York: Mariner Books, 1999), P. 5.
^[3] Bart Mooregilbert, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (London: Verso, 1997).
^[4] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Marginality in the Teaching Machine’, Outside in the Teaching Machine (London: Routledge, 1993), P. 56.

Shirley Chew was educated at the University of Singapore (BA Hons, 1961; PhD, 1977) and Oxford University (MPhil, 1969). She is currently Professor in the Division of English, Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and is Emeritus Professor at the University of Leeds where she was the incumbent of the Chair of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literatures from 1993 to 2003. Previous academic posts were held at the Department of English, University of Singapore, and the School of English, University of Leeds. She is the founding editor of Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings (2001—), co-published since 2011 from Leeds University and NTU. She has published widely in Postcolonial and Colonial literatures.