- Length
- 400 pagesPenguin Classics, 2003, with the author's later preface
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
Orientalism
The book that made the study of how the West describes the rest of the world into a discipline. Said argued that European knowledge of the Orient was inseparable from European power over it, and spent the next twenty-five years answering people who thought he had said something simpler.
- Date
- 1978
- Author
- Edward W. Said
- Region
- New York
- Language
- English
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Genealogical — History of a concept used as a critique of it
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years back to what it answers
- 12 years
Founded a discipline, was attacked from the moment of publication by area specialists and by the left alike, and remains among the most cited academic books ever written.
What the book says
A study of a body of European writing about the East, arguing that it tells you almost nothing about the East and a great deal about Europe. Said's claim is that Orientalism is not a field of study that happened to produce distortions but a discourse - a system of statements, institutions, scholarship, novels, travel writing and colonial administration, mutually reinforcing, which produced the Orient as an object and thereby produced Europe as its opposite. The Orient it describes is unchanging, sensual, despotic, irrational and incapable of representing itself, and each attribute is the negative of something Europe wished to claim. What makes the system durable is that it is self-confirming: a scholar arrives with the framework, finds what it predicts, and adds to the archive that the next scholar consults. Said traces this through French and British writing from the late eighteenth century and into American policy expertise, and argues that knowledge and power were not accidentally connected here but were the same enterprise - the expertise made the administration possible and the administration funded the expertise.
What it argues
That representation is not a mirror held to a region but an act with consequences, and that a body of scholarship can be rigorous, learned and systematically wrong at the same time. Said is careful about the last point and it is regularly missed: he does not claim the Orientalists were fools or liars, and many of them were formidable scholars. His claim is that the framework within which they worked determined what counted as evidence, that the Orient it constructed was a European object, and that the people described had no place in the conversation. The connection to power is the argument's core: this scholarship arose alongside empire, was funded by it, staffed it, and supplied the categories in which populations were governed - and continues, in Said's account, in the expertise that advises modern states about the same region.
What it answered
Foucault on discourse, and the discipline of Oriental studies as it stood. He is also answering, more personally, the way Palestinians appeared in American public discussion - as a problem, a security question, or not at all. He said the book grew from the experience of watching a people he belonged to be described by people who had never asked them anything.
How it argues
By close reading of an enormous and deliberately mixed archive - philologists, poets, novelists, diplomats, travellers, colonial officials - on the principle that a discourse operates across genres and that separating scholarship from literature would miss how it works. The method is literary criticism applied to material usually left to historians, which is a large part of why historians objected. The prose is elegant and the tone is controlled anger, which the book's admirers and detractors both notice.
The moment
Said was a Palestinian born in Jerusalem, educated in Cairo and the United States, and professor of comparative literature at Columbia. He wrote in the aftermath of the 1973 war and the surge of American interest in the Middle East, at a moment when the region was being explained to the American public by experts whose framework he recognised. He served on the Palestinian National Council, broke with Arafat over the Oslo accords, and died in 2003.
How it travelled
Into the foundation of a field. Postcolonial studies as an academic discipline dates substantially from this book, and its vocabulary - othering, the imaginative geography of a region, the coupling of knowledge and power - passed into literary studies, anthropology, history, area studies and eventually into general educated speech. It has been translated into more than thirty languages, including Arabic, Hebrew and Turkish, and its reception in each has been political in its own way.
The strongest objection
That the archive is selected to produce the conclusion, and that this matters more than usual for a book about selective description. Said works almost entirely from British and French sources and largely omits German Orientalism, which was extensive, scholarly and belonged to no empire in the region - a case that would test the knowledge-power link precisely. Critics also note that Orientalist scholarship included figures who devoted their lives to languages and texts they revered, and that treating an entire discipline as an instrument leaves no account of them. A separate and sharper objection, made from the left by Aijaz Ahmad, is that a book about the material relations of empire conducts its analysis entirely at the level of texts, so that the discourse floats free of the economics that produced it. Said's afterword answers some of this and concedes little.
Why read it
The introduction, which states the whole argument and is one of the clearest pieces of theoretical writing of its period, and the 1995 afterword, which is where Said says what he did and did not claim. The historical chapters are long. Read it knowing that the popular version of its thesis is cruder than the book.
- First printed
- 1978
- First in English
- 1978
- Digitised
- No
The 1995 afterword answers the main lines of criticism and the 2003 preface, written after the invasion of Iraq, returns to the political stakes. Culture and Imperialism (1993) extends the argument to the literature of empire and includes the response to the charge that the first book left no room for resistance.
Written in English and translated into more than thirty languages. In copyright.
Where it stands
Live and permanently contested. It is a founding text of a discipline that continues to argue about it, and the questions it raised about who may describe whom, and on what evidence, have not become less pressing.
On quoting this book
In copyright. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
The omission of German scholarship is the most damaging factual objection and has never been fully answered. Whether the argument leaves any room for resistance, or makes the discourse total, was pressed hard enough that Said wrote a second book partly in reply. Whether his use of Foucault is coherent, given that he retains an author, a truth and a moral position Foucault's method dissolves, is a standing philosophical criticism. And the book's political reception - claimed as a weapon and denounced as one - has run so far ahead of its contents that Said spent his last decades correcting readings from both directions.