Post-Colonial Literature (E-C-305-C)

Name: Zindagi V. Rathod

Paper: Post-Colonial Literature (E-C-305-C)

Roll no. : I3

Year: 2010-11

Semester : I

Topic: Orientalism -By Edward Said

Submitted to, :-

Dr.Dilip Barad

Department of English

Bhavnagar University.

Orientalism- by Edward Said

         Post- colonism refers to asset of theories in Philosophy and literature that grapple with the legacy of colonial rule. In this sense, post-colonial literature may be considered a branch of postmodern literature concerned with the political and cultural independence of peoples formerly subjugated in colonial empires.

              In the field of post colonial Studies has been gaining prominence since the 1970s. Some would date its rise in the Western academy from the publication of Edward Said’s influential critique of Western construction of the Orient in his 1978 book, Orientalism. The growing currency within the academy of the term postcolonial was consolidated by the appearance in 1989 of The Empire Writes  Back: Theory and Practice in Post colonial Literature by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin.

            November 1, 1935 – September 24, 2003; was a well-known Palestinian American literary theorist, critic, and outspoken pro-Palestinian activist.  He was a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. He is regarded as a founding figure in post colonial theory.

                       Said is best known for describing and critiquing “Orientalism,” which he perceived as a constellation of false assumptions underlying Western attitudes towards the East. In Orientalism, Said described the “subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their cultural.”  He argued that a long tradition of false and romanticized images of Asia and the middle East in Western cultural had served as an implicit justification for Europe and America’s colonial and imperial ambitions. Just as fiercely, he denounced the practice of Arab elites who internalized the American and British orientalists ideas of Arabic culture.

                   In 1980 Said criticized what he regarded as poor understanding of the Arab cultural in the West. So far as the United States seems to be concerned, it is only a slight overstatement to say that Moslems and Arabs are essentially seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists. What we have instead is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world presented in such a way as to make that valuable to military aggression.

        Orientalism has had a significant impact on the fields of literary theory and cultural studies, and to a lesser extent on those of History and Studies. Taking his from the work of Jacques Derrida and Michel  Foucault acknowledging the influence of the latter, but not the former, and from earlier critics of western Orientalism such whose influence also went unacknowledged, Said argued that all Western writings on the orient, and the perceptions of the East purveyed in them, can not be taken value.

           According to Said, the history of European colonial rule and political domination over the East distorts the writings of even the most knowledgeable, meaning and sympathetic Western Orientalists. Said’s contention was that Europe had dominated Asia politically so completely for so long, that in Orientalist writings a very considerable exists in even the most outwardly objective  of texts, which most Western scholars would not even be able to recognize, cause it is part of their cultural makeup too. His contention was that the West has not only conquered the East politically, but that Western scholars have appropriated the exploration and interpretation of the Orient’s language, history, and cultural for themselves.

       Said’s book attracted both adulation and criticism from the very outset. Said devoted much less attention to the British Raj in India, by far the lengthiest and most successful example of European hegemony in the Orient.

       Both supporters of Edward Said and his critics acknowledge the profound, transformative influence which his book Orientalism has had across the spectrum of the Humanities.