Orientalism

Edward Said and the controversy over Orientalism

Initially the word carried no negative freight. Respected institutions like the Oriental Institute of Chicago carry the term without reproach. "Oriental" was simply understood as the opposite of "occidental" ('western'). Nevertheless, it became associated with negative meanings, for example contrasting "oriental despotism" and alleged cultural inertia with Western notions of progress. Though "Occident" has no similar patronizing connotations, it is being sympathetically dropped from usage, as contemporary English speakers struggle to achieve history's first culturally-neutral language.

The negative connotation of the term were highlighted by the Palestinian scholar Edward Said in his groundbreaking work Orientalism (1978), which emphasized the relationship between power and knowledge in scholarly and popular thinking, in particular regarding European views of the Islamic Arab world. Said argued that Orient and Occident worked as oppositional terms, so that the "Orient" was constructed as a negative inversion of Western culture.
Taking a comparative and historical literary review of European scholars and writers looking at, thinking about, talking about, and writing about the peoples of the Middle East, Said sought to lay bare the relations of power between the colonizer and the colonized in those texts. While his work owes much (as Said himself made clear) to Michel Foucault's cultural critiques, Said's writings have had far-reaching implications beyond area studies in Middle East, to India, China, and post-colonial studies generally.

Many scholars now use Said's work to undermine long-held, often taken-for-granted European ideological biases regarding non-Europeans in scholarly thought. Some post-colonial scholars would even say that the West's idea of itself was constructed largely by saying what others were not. If "Europe" evolved out of "Christendom" as the "not-Byzantium," early modern Europe in the late 16th century (see Battle of Lepanto) certainly defined itself as the "not-Turkey."

In the nineteenth century western culture built up an exotic stereotype of "the Orient": seductive women (the femme fatale) and dangerous men living in a static society with a glorious but long-gone past. Many critical theorists regard this form of Orientalism as part of a larger, ideological colonialism justified by the concept of the "white man's burden".
, 1862
When Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, director of the French Académie de peinture painted a highly-colored vision of a harem (illustration, right), a place that no Westerner save Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had ever actually penetrated, he made his eroticized Orient publicly acceptable by his diffuse generalizing of the female forms, who might all have been of the same model. If his painting had simply been retitled "In a Paris Brothel," it would have been far less acceptable. Sensuality was seen as acceptable in the exotic orient. This Orientalizing imagery persisted in art into the early tewntieth century, as evidenced in Matisse's orientalist nudes.

Similarly, through the 20th century, the only breasts photographed in National Geographic were brown-skinned, in exotic cultures without automoblies.

Although the critique of Orientalism originated as an exposition of Western views of the Orient, it has also been used to critique 20th century Chinese views of both its own history and of minority cultures within China. For example, Lionel Jensen argues that modern Chinese narratives of Confucianism and of Chinese history in general have incorporated many orientalist assumptions.

"Orientalism" in reference to art and culture

"Chinoiserie" is the catch-all term for the fashion for Chinese themes in decoration in Western Europe, beginning in the late 17th century and peaking in waves, especially Rococo Chinoiserie, ca 1740 - 1770. Earliest hints of Chinoiserie appear, in the early 17th century, in the nations with active East India Companies, Holland and England, then by mid-17th century, Portugal. Tin-glazed pottery made at Delft and other Dutch towns adopted genuine blue-and-white Ming decoration from the early 17th century, and early ceramic wares at Meissen and other centers of true porcelain naturally imitated Chinese shapes for dishes, vases and tea wares. But in the true Chinoiserie décor fairyland, mandarins lived in fanciful mountainous landscapes with cobweb bridges, carried flower parasols, lolled in flimsy bamboo pavilions haunted by dragons and phoenixes, while monkeys swung from scrolling borders.

Pleasure pavilions in "Chinese taste" appeared in the formal parterres of late Baroque and Rococo German palaces, and in tile panels at Aranjuez near Madrid. Thomas Chippendale's mahogany tea tables and china cabinets, especially, were embellished with fretwork glazing and railings, ca 1753 - 70, but sober homages to early Xing scholars' furnishings were also naturalized, as the tang evolved into a mid- Georgian side table and squared slat-back armchairs suited English gentlemen as well as Chinese scholars. Not every adaptation of Chinese design principles falls within mainstream "chinoiserie." Chinoiserie media included "japanned" ware imitations of lacquer and painted tin (tôle) ware that imitated japanning, early painted wallpapers in sheets, and ceramic figurines and table ornaments.

Small pagodas appeared on chimneypieces and full-sized ones in gardens. Kew has a magnificent garden pagoda designed by Sir William Chambers. Though the rise of a more serious approach in Neoclassicism from the 1770s onward tended to squelch such Oriental folly, at the height of Regency "Grecian" furnishings, the Prince Regent came down with a case of Brighton Pavilion, and Chamberlain's Worcester china manufactory imitated gaudy "Imari" wares. Later exoticisms added imaginary Turkish themes, where a diwan became a sofa. (See Sezincote, Gloucestershire.)

After 1860, Japonerie, sparked by the arrival of Japanese woodblock prints, became an important influence in the western arts. The brilliant paintings of James MacNeill 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. As late as 1920 ladies of the mandarin classes of London and Boston quite unselfconsciously wore kimono at breakfast, as a kind of imperial negligée. The syncretic Art Deco movement adapted Japanese, Chinese, and Assyrian motifs, among others, as exemplified by the architecture and decor of the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco. After World War I, Chinoiserie gradually collapsed in a welter of Kewpie dolls and exotic ashtrays, and, after 1945, Hawaiian shirts.

Orientalism covered a vague and exotic domain that was mostly "East of Suez," where gritty realities did not intrude. But ancient Carthage (Tunisia) formed the background for Gustave Flaubert's Salammbô and North Africa, from the moment of the French occupation of Algiers in 1830, provided orientalizing odalisque themes, from high-minded Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres and Jean-Léon Gérôme, to the arty erotica in harem settings of 1860 - 1890.

Compare elements of (in historical order):

• Montesquieu Persian Letters (Lettres persanes)
• Jean-Philippe Rameau Les Indes Galantes
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge "Kublai Khan"
• William Thomas Beckford's Vathek;
• Percy Bysshe Shelley's' "Ozymandias"
• Edgar Allan Poe's Tamerlane, Al Aaraaf, and Israfel
• Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1821 poem "Indian Superstition"
• Jane Austen's Mansfield Park
• Richard Francis Burton's The Arabian Nights;
• the Malay passages in Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater;
• Georges Bizet's Les Pêcheurs de Perles
• Balakirev's Tamara, Borodin's Polovtsian Dances in opera Prince Igor, César Cui's opera The Mandarin's Son, Mussorgsky's Dance of the Persian Slaves (Khovanshchina), Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheheradze -- the Mighty Handful aka the Five Russian composers
• Oscar Wilde's Salomé;
• Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado;
• Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly & Turandot;
• Anatole France Thaïs
• Victor Segalen's Rene Leys
• Andre Malraux's La Condition humaine
• Marguerite Yourcenar's Nouvelles Orientales
• Italo Calvino's Le città invisibili
• Marguerite Duras' L'Amant

• Many early 21st century Western cartoons have been stylisticly influenced by Japanese anime, which is itself becoming very popular in the West. Middle Eastern, Chinese, and Japanese themes are here usually put in the service of exotic fantasy.
• The strong popular association of the martial arts, such as karate, jujitsu and kendo, with Asian cultures.

A mirror image

The Western Hu are far away.
:They live in an outer zone.

Their countries' products are beautiful and precious,
:But their character is debauched and frivolous.

They do not follow the rites of China.
:Han has the canonical books.

They do not obey the Way of the Gods.

How pitiful!

How obstinate!

The decline of scholarly "Oriental Studies" and transition to "Asian Studies" (in North America)

In most universities in North America, Oriental Studies has now been replaced by Asian Studies localized to specific regions, such as, Near Eastern Studies, South Asian studies, and Far East or East Asian Studies. This reflects the fact that the Orient is not a single, monolithic region but rather a broad area encompassing multiple civilizations. A growing number of professional scholars and students of East Asian Studies are Asian Americans, especially Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, and Korean Americans.

See also