Summary of Edward W. Said's Orientalism , livre ebook

Everest Media LLC - Everest Media

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

45 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 The choice of Oriental was canonical. It designated Asia or the East, geographically, morally, and culturally. It was used by Chaucer and Mandeville, by Shakespeare, Dryden, Pope, and Byron.
#2 The first theme that dominates Balfour’s speech is knowledge. He believes that by studying and understanding a civilization from its origins to its decline, you can gain authority over it and ultimately dominate it.
#3 Balfour’s speech is significant for the way in which he plays the part of and represents a variety of characters. He speaks for the English, the West, and the relatively small corps of colonial officials in Egypt.
#4 The most important thing about the theory was that it worked staggeringly well. The argument was clear, precise, and easy to grasp. There are Westerners, and there are Orientals. The former dominate; the latter must be dominated, which usually means having their land occupied and their blood and treasure put at the disposal of one or another Western power.

Sujets

Géographie

Général

Ethnic studies

Colonisation

Informations

Publié par	Everest Media LLC
Date de parution	25 mars 2022
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9781669365204
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0000€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Insights on Edward W. Said's Orientalism
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The choice of Oriental was canonical. It designated Asia or the East, geographically, morally, and culturally. It was used by Chaucer and Mandeville, by Shakespeare, Dryden, Pope, and Byron.

#2

The first theme that dominates Balfour’s speech is knowledge. He believes that by studying and understanding a civilization from its origins to its decline, you can gain authority over it and ultimately dominate it.

#3

Balfour’s speech is significant for the way in which he plays the part of and represents a variety of characters. He speaks for the English, the West, and the relatively small corps of colonial officials in Egypt.

#4

The most important thing about the theory was that it worked staggeringly well. The argument was clear, precise, and easy to grasp. There are Westerners, and there are Orientals. The former dominate; the latter must be dominated, which usually means having their land occupied and their blood and treasure put at the disposal of one or another Western power.

#5

The commercial spirit should be under some control, which means that in dealing with Indians, Egyptians, or Zulus, the first question is to consider what these people think is best for their own interests, although this is a point that deserves serious consideration.

#6

The main characteristic of the Oriental mind is its lack of accuracy. The European is a close reasoner, and his statements of fact are devoid of any ambiguity. The Oriental, on the other hand, is eminently wanting in symmetry. His reasoning is of the most slipshod description.

#7

Orientalism was a rationalization of colonial rule, and it was used to justify the relationship between Europe and the Orient. The West was always in a position of strength, and the Orient was always inferior.

#8

Orientalism is the study of the Orient that places things Oriental in class, court, prison, or manual for scrutiny, study, judgment, discipline, or governing. It is the assumption that the Orient is inferior to the West, and needs to be corrected by the West.

#9

Orientalism is a set of constraints upon and limitations of thought, and it has influenced both Europeans and Orientals. It was developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and it was based on the ineradicable distinction between Western superiority and Oriental inferiority.

#10

Orientalism is a third form in which the West has viewed the Orient. It was initially a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar and the strange.

#11

Orientalism is the process by which the West feeds off of and profits from the East. It is a form of knowledge that is regulated first by the local concerns of a specialist, then by the general concerns of a social system of authority.

#12

Orientalism is a form of thought that divides the world into large general divisions, and it is used to push the importance of the distinction between some men and some other men, usually towards not especially admirable ends.

#13

The Newtonian revolution has not taken place in the developing world, and thus they retain the essentially pre-Newtonian view that the real world is completely internal to the observer. Consequently, empirical reality has a different significance for many of the new countries than it does for the West.

#14

The distinction between pre- and post-Newtonian realities is the same as the one made by Orientalists between Orientals and Westerners. And like Orientalism, Kissinger’s distinction is not value-free.

#15

The Orientalist argument is that while the Arab value system demands absolute solidarity within the group, it at the same time encourages among its members a kind of rivalry that is destructive of that very solidarity.

#16

Orientalism is a field of learned study, and it has always had an ambition to be as large as possible. It is a field that was created to study things Oriental, but it has been so widely generalized that it now studies almost anything foreign.

#17

Orientalism is an academic discipline that has existed since the mid-eighteenth century. It was originally a treasure-house of learning, but over time it began to be used to describe the exotic, the mysterious, and the profound.

#18

The second index of how inclusive Orientalism had become was seen in nineteenth-century chronicles of the field. The most thorough of its kind was Jules Mohl’s Vingt-sept Ans d’histoire des études orientales, a two-volume logbook of everything of note that took place in Orientalism between 1840 and 1867.

#19

The impact of Orientalism was made through books and manuscripts, not through mimetic artifacts like sculpture and pottery. The Orient was a textual universe, and the Europeans who studied it were generally academic Orientalists who were interested in the classical period of whatever language or society they studied.

#20

The mind seems to constantly form a concrete science. For example, a primitive tribe will assign a specific place, function, and significance to every leafy species in its immediate environment. Many of these plants have no practical use, but the point is that mind requires order, and order is achieved by discriminating and taking note of everything.

#21

The sense in which we feel ourselves to be not-foreign is based on a very unrigorous idea of what is out there beyond our own territory. We convert the vacant or anonymous reaches of distance into meaning for ourselves by means of poetic processes.

#22

The Orient was something more than what was empirically known about it. The West was always trying to defeat the East, and the East always seemed to respond in kind by representing Asia as empty, lost, and disaster-stricken.

#23

The two aspects of the Orient that set it off from the West are its power and its distance. The East is represented in these plays by the elderly Persian queen, Xerxes’ mother, who speaks in the person of the continent. Europe speaks for the Orient.

#24

The Orient was originally known as the Old World, and was subdivided into the Near Orient and the Far Orient. The Near Orient was familiar to travelers and eastward-looking Western potentate, and the Far Orient was a new place that they came to conquer.

#25

The West has a history of encountering and judging the Orient based on the literature that was produced by these encounters. The West’s contempt for what is familiar and its shivers of delight in novelty.

#26

Until the end of the seventeenth century, the Ottoman Empire continued to lurk alongside Europe to represent for Christian civilization a constant threat.

#27

The reception of Islam in the West is a perfect example of how the West assimilated the exotic. As Norman Daniel explains, Islam was analogized with Christ, and thus Mohammed was automatically labeled as an imposter.

#28

The Christian view of Islam was intensified during the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, when the Near Orient was almost completely incorporated into the common world-picture of Latin Christianity.

#29

The West’s view of Islam has grown more complex and refined over time, not more positive. The character of Mohammed was shaped by the fictions of the Middle Ages, and he became the epitome of lechery, debauchery, and a whole battery of assorted treacheries.

#30

The field of Orientalism is a learned field that is confined to the Orient. It is a theater stage on which figures representing the larger East are displayed. The Orient then seems to be a closed field, not an unlimited extension beyond the European world.

#31

The Bibliothèque was like any other history of the world, except that it included sources from the Orient. It was able to convince European readers that the study of Oriental culture was more than just thankless and fruitless.

#32

The Bibliothèque orientale was a collection of randomly acquired facts about vaguely Levantine history, Biblical imagery, Islamic culture, place names, and so on, which were organized into a rational Oriental panorama.

#33

The didactic quality of the Orientalist representation cannot be detached from the rest of the performance. In a learned work like the Bibliothèque orientale, which was the result of systematic study and research, the author imposed a disciplinary order upon the material he had worked on.

#34

The process of conversion, which is the process of changing other cultures from what they are into what the West believes they should be, is a disciplined one. It is taught, it has its own societies, periodicals, and traditions. It is so total in what it tries to do that as one surveys Orientalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the overwhelming impression is of its insensitive schematization of the entire Orient.

#35

Islam is placed in a hierarchy of evils with falsifiers and traitors. Mohammed’s punishment is particularly disgusting: he is being cleft in two from his chin to his anus like a cask whose staves are ripped apart.

#36

The Western view of the Orient is shaped by the Orientalist vision, which is the result of the schematism of Western geography, history, and above all, morality.