No other book of Edward Saïd’s has enjoyed the attention of Orientalism. Since its publication in 1978, it has been translated into over twenty-four languages. It has been the subject of numerous conferences and the occasion of impassioned debates. Perhaps more than any work of late 20th century cultural criticism, it has transformed the study of literature and culture. Yet for all of its success, Orientalism initially had difficulty finding a major publisher. Some publishing houses did not consider the book ground-breaking; still others were unwilling to back a book whose politics were at odds with the mainstream’s view of Palestinians, Arabs, and Israel. Of the few publishers that expressed an early interest in it, the University of California Press offered Saïd a paltry $200 advance. Eventually, however, Pantheon, renowned for publishing the works of intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, sent Orientalism to press in late 1977.

Orientalism’s impact surprised both its publishers and even Saïd himself. For the topic of Orientalism – Europe’s representations of the East – was not entirely new; other scholars had addressed the subject before. In 1953, for example, Raymond Schwab wrote Le Renaissance orientale (a fastidiously detailed study of Europe’s 19th-century experience of the Orient); a decade later, Anwar Abdel Malek wrote an influential article “Orientalism in Crisis” (a Marxist interpretation of Europe’s representation of the “East”). In 1969, V.G. Kiernan wrote The Lords of the Human Kind (a history of European colonization).

But Orientalism differed markedly from its predecessors. It brought together the philosophies of Michel Foucault, Raymond Williams and Antonio Gramsci to challenge the authority of Western knowledge of – and power over – the Orient. Orientalism examines an array of 19th century French and British novelists, poets, politicians, philologists, historians, travelers, and imperial administrators: the voyages and travel narratives of 19th century French authors such as Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Nerval, and Flaubert; the Indian journalism of Karl Marx; the writings of the first modern Orientalist Sylvestre de Sacy and of the French 19th century philologist Ernest Renan; the adventure tales of Richard Burton and T.E Lawrence; the speeches of Alfred Balfour; and the cables of British colonial governors in Egypt like Lord Cromer.

Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, Saïd views this ensemble of writing on the Orient as a discourse, exploring how together the writings of Renan, Flaubert, T.E. Lawrence and others composed a discipline by which European culture managed and produced the “Orient”. Their writings expressed “a will . . . not only to understand what [was] non-European, but also to control and manipulate what was manifestly different.” For Saïd (as well as Foucault) a discourse was the means through which power exercised, constructed and objectified the human subject of knowledge.

Yet if Foucault offered Saïd a means of describing the relationship between knowledge and power over the Orient, Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony provided a way of explaining how the influence of certain ideas about the “Orient” prevailed over others. The extensive influence of a particular idea, Gramsci argued, operated not through the brute application of force in non-totalitarian societies, but by consent – a tacit, unwritten agreement often passed off as conventional wisdom or common sense. Hegemony, Saïd explained, was how Orientalism could remain an indefatigable cultural and political force in the Western media’s representations of Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims.

Yet Gramsci’s writings suggested more to Saïd than the idea of hegemony; Gramsci offered him a way of conceptualizing his own predicament. The best and most effective critiques, wrote Gramsci, begin when writers understand themselves as the products of the historical process, a process which leaves its traces without necessarily leaving an inventory of them. Orientalism was thus Saïd’s own account, his own inventory, of “the infinite traces” that decades of dispossession and exile had placed upon him and other “Oriental” subjects.

Among the traces deposited by the years of dispossession was Saïd’s experience of the June 1967 Arab-Israel War. As both Saïd and his late and dear friend Ibrahim Abu-Lughod recounted in the BBC’s documentary film In Search of Palestine (1998), the Arab defeat in 1967 had magnified his subjective sense of the Palestinians’ objective national loss. Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem, and all Saïd would hear over the radio waves in Manhattan was a discussion of how “we” were doing, whether or not “we” were winning. In his early essay “The Arab Portrayed” (1968), written in the aftermath of the war at the behest of Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Saïd penned what later became the central theme of Orientalism:

If the Arab occupies space enough for attention it is a negative value. He is seen as a disrupter of Israel’s and the West’s existence, or … as a surmountable obstacle to Israel’s creation in 1948. Palestine was imagined as an empty desert waiting to burst into bloom, its inhabitants inconsequential nomads possessing no stable claim to the land and therefore no cultural permanence.

Orientalism was thus “a history of personal loss and national disintegration,” as he later wrote. Its aim was to “liberate intellectuals from the shackles of systems of thought like Orientalism.”

The apprentices of modern day Orientalism responded fiercely. Leon Wieseltier wrote that Orientalism issued “little more than abject canards of Arab propaganda”. In a belated riposte published in The New York Review of Books, Bernard Lewis accused Saïd of “poisoning” the field of “Oriental” studies. Calling Saïd “reckless”, “arbitrary”, “insouciant”, and “outrageous”, Lewis recounted how Saïd, along with other Arab, Muslim, and Marxist critics, had “polluted” the word “Orientalism”. Saïd, Lewis argued, had attempted to denigrate the work of well-intentioned, disinterested Orientalists; he had politicized an innocent scholarship.

Yet the shrill protests from Saïd’s critics revealed less about Saïd’s work than about their own false and constructed assumptions. Veiled in language of “scholarship” and “objectivity”, their indignation was, as one reviewer put it, “an indication of the Orientalist attitudes that Saïd himself had described.” Lewis merely “delivered ahistorical and willful political assertions in the form of scholarly argument, a practice thoroughly in keeping with the least creditable aspects of old-fashioned colonialist Orientalism”, Saïd responded.

International publishers soon took notice. Within two years of its publication and a year after its debut in England (1979), numerous translations began to appear. In 1980, Editions du Seuil published the French edition with an introduction by the French-Bulgarian literary critic Tzvetan Todorov. In the same year, Kamul Abu Deeb, the Syrian poet and critic, published an innovative translation in Arabic. Translations in German, Turkish and Persian soon followed. The Spanish and Catalan editions were published in 1991. There were translations in Japanese and Swedish in 1993, as well as others in Serbo-Croatian, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Korean, Greek, and most recently Vietnamese.

In addition to the numerous essays, many, though certainly not all of them, arising out of debates and discussions of Orientalism, a collection of books and monographs devoted to his vast and fertilely productively oeuvre have emerged over the past five years. Yet in spite of all these notable attempts to define and identify an over-arching methodology that can be traced throughout Saïd’s some thirty books, with perhaps only one extraordinary exception, few critics have successfully or at the very least convincingly identified an overall method that endures from his earliest work, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, to his later works such as Culture and Imperialism and Reflections on Exile. That such an Olympian thinker, who is credited with the invention of fields like Postcolonial Studies, and who made a decidedly transforming contribution to the reinvention of humanism in general, has elaborated such a contested and seemingly elusive overall method testifies neither to the difficulty of his work, nor to the fact that his critics seem to know only about half as much as he did.

Why this is the case has as much to do with what appears in his works as an informal method as it does with his method’s relationship to the fields of Cultural and Postcolonial Studies as a whole – all fields which, it should be stated, are rooted in different traditions and conventions of literary and cultural interpretation that cannot so easily come to grasp the theoretical underpinnings of Saïd’s work. Indeed, Saïd’s intellectual development can be traced, though not grossly reduced to his affiliations with a wide range figures, intellectuals, and critics including the philologists Erich Auerbach and Giambattista Vico, as well as the work of cultural critics such as Georg Lukács, Raymond Williams, Theodor Adorno, and to a lesser extent the eccentric modernist literary critic R. P. Blackmur, a professor of Saïd’s at Princeton in the mid-1950s.

What has made these affinities difficult to discern and elaborate together in the form of an identifiable method of critical activity is that throughout Saïd’s writings as well as his interviews, he has never explicitly defined a sustained method for himself, in spite of the substantial scholarly attention paid to the introduction of Orientalism, where the theoretical contributions of Michel Foucault, Friedrich Nietzsche and Antonio Gramsci play a prevalent, but by no means a defining, role for Saïd’s work as a whole. Partly a consequence of the enormous attention paid to the presence of this triumvirate of theorists and their often oblique relevance to Saïd’s many other works, critics have often settled mostly for descriptions of Saïd’s general critical attitude that has served to conceal the real critical foundations of his model, if it can even be called such a thing. Indeed, Saïd’s work is often described as presenting a heightened, powerfully motivated restlessness that is executed in a variety of worldly ways, making often provocative connections between, for example in Culture and Imperialism, Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and the novel’s dependence on plantation slave labor in the Antilles. All of this is similarly the case with his discussion of the seemingly paradoxical representation of musical silence in the scores and performances of Ludwig von Beethoven, the operas of Wagner, the performances of Glenn Gould on the one hand, and the role silence in the works of postcolonial critics such as Ranajit Guha on the other.

All of this was rooted in Saïd’s personal and tragic experiences of exile from Palestine in December 1947, and his acutely political knowledge of the domesticating forces of academic fields, disciplines, and institutions, which tend to appropriate, and, in the end, evacuate theoretical activity of its ongoing political relevance, thus solidifying them into a fixed and rigid gestures that are repeated in the form of an often numbing and complacent professionalism whose sole aim is, as he argued in a spectacular exchange with Stanley Fish, to reproduce existing forms of social and academic relations in the academy and in society at large. Tirelessly thwarting the reification of the major critical categories and insights of his work – the idea of contrapuntal criticism (that he discusses Culture and Imperialism), the critical concept of affiliations and the practice of secular criticism (that he elaborates in The World, The Text, and the Critic) – Saïd’s work refuses to identify a method other than in relative general terms of an ongoing and worldly process and activity of critical consciousness, which undermines the immobilizing limitations around which almost all methodologies revolve. His work thereby avoids hardening into the lapidary forms of static orthodoxies, theoretical dogmas, and provincial forms of professionalism, and thus poses a great difficulty if not an outright aporia for those who endeavor to synthesize his massive oeuvre into an identifiable method or model.

Yet another reason why Saïd’s method has remained so elusive is related at least circumstantially to the scholarly efforts to identify a set of interpretative procedures that has, as Timothy Brennan has observed, overemphasized the Foucaultian dimensions of Orientalism to such an extent that the defining contributions of Giambattista Vico, Erich Auerbach, Georg Lukács, Raymond Williams and Theodor Adorno have been overshadowed by the presence of Michel Foucault in the first part of Orientalism. This is not simply because of the explicit emphasis that Saïd places on several critical categories drawn from Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge (the idea of exteriority, for example), but has as much to do with the fashion of French Theory and Poststructuralism and the serious reception of Foucault’s work in the early 1980s. Indeed, the dominant thrust of Orientalism was to establish the conditions for a form of non-dominative and non-coercive knowledge and power in Western culture’s representation of the Islamic East.

Nevertheless, Foucault’s importance for Saïd’s Orientalism only partly accounts for his method there and elsewhere, in books like Beginnings: Intention and Method, where, in the early 1970s, Saïd was among one of the first critics to introduce Foucault’s work to an English-speaking audience in “Abecedarium Culturae”, “the ABCc’s of culture”. To read Saïd’s oeuvre in Foucaultian terms certainly helps to grasp what has been his awareness of the inextricable relationship between the will to power and the will knowledge; yet what all of this overlooks is not just the role of Antonio Gramsci, whose idea of hegemony and consent explains how certain ideas about the so-called Orient prevail over others in democratic societies, but glazes over the tacit, though fundamental role of Raymond Williams in his work. Indeed, what the attention lavished on Saïd’s relation to Foucault concealed was Saïd’s active relationship to the Romantic tradition of British Marxism in general and the writings of Raymond Williams’ The Country and the City in particular. Unlike Foucault, Williams provided Saïd not with a kind of method, but a theoretical problem posed by the literary and poetic forms of the country-house poems of the eighteenth century, the nineteenth century novels of Jane Austen, the rural accounts of the countryside by Cobbett, and the urbanization of rural lands represented in Dickens, Hardy, and Orwell, and others. Indeed, the drive of Williams’ work is to emphasize the physical absence of subordinate classes, rural workers, peasants, and guest laborers and immigrant workers from Britain’s innumerable colonies, whose seemingly invisibility and relationship to the city and countryside result in what both Saïd and Williams consider to be the emergence of a contested social relationship over the geographical, territorial and property divisions that are part of the development of novels and other aesthetic forms from Virgil’s Georgics onwards.

Yet as Williams himself observed, certain kinds of methodological breakthroughs can just as easily become methodological traps. Orientalism and Saïd’s other works like Culture and Imperialism are thus not simply concerned with activating the cultural politics of these lapses and silences and thereby undermining the historical and cultural forces of the interdependent and dominating relationship between knowledge and power. Making these silences resonate is not merely a question of access to the institutions of public and social authority that help to enable it, but also involves what Saïd calls a critical consciousness and worldly knowledge of the historical contingencies of material and textual evidence, and of the authority upon which they depend. For example, in a polemic with the Israeli New Historian Benny Morris, whose The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem was based on countless reports, documents, memoranda, intelligence cables, and cabinet meetings through which Morris adduced the process of the dispossession of Palestinians in 1947 and 1948, Saïd has argued that Morris’s method was limited precisely by the scope of evidence that was available to Morris in the Israel State Archive. While Morris uncovered a great deal that empirically challenged the mythology of Israel’s emergence as a state founded at little expense to the lived and daily experience of Palestinians, why, Saïd asks, should Morris restrict his account to the purely textual and official evidence that he “uncovered” in the corridors of state power? Why not also read the record and the texture of the land, the traces of which reveal another history that was not included in Morris’ study? All of this is to say that forms of silence are deeply and profoundly part of the reproduction of existing social and political relations and the systems of thought that sustain these relations and ways of knowing, thereby enabling the political, military, and economic forces of empires to dominate minorities, colonized peoples, and indigenous subjects alike and in distinctive ways.

Of all the methods that Saïd employs to transcend this mostly political and cultural structure of domination and coercion, no two interpretative strategies have been of more importance to his work than the work of Erich Auerbach and Giambattista Vico. Indeed, critics such as Bruce Robbins, Timothy Brennan and Aamir Mufti have observed the importance for Saïd of both Vico and Auerbach before. A scholar of incredible classical and philological training and part of a loosely defined group of German critics, including Ernest Robert Curtius (1886-1956), Leo Spitzer (1887-1960), Karl Vossler (1872-1949), Auerbach’s work has been mostly taken as recapitulating a general thematics and the cultural vicissitudes of exile for Saïd. For Auerbach, however, philology entails a certain historical perspective as well as the firm belief that every culture and period are part of a series of cultural and material conditions that are not dissociable from the different stylistic registers of literary realism. While literary works are all part of different historical periods and cultural traditions that derive from circumstances pertaining to an artist’s immediate conditions, experiences, and grim or not-so-grim realities and conditions of existence, they are also related in often inextricable ways to other historical social and literary forms that are culturally available to them as well. The work of Dante, Cervantes, Flaubert, Joyce, or Naguib Mahfouz, for example, should not be evaluated by abstract categories of beauty that are invoked in ways that often transcend and even overlook the conditions pertaining to the stylistic registers of their artistic endeavors, but rather should be situated by the critic as part of a set of overlapping cultural relations between, for example, Dante and the Islamic philosopher Averroes. What precludes Auerbach from lapsing into a relativist historicism, however, is that for Auerbach the study of these social conditions is not merely an issue for literary historiography, but involves instead a thorough and rigorous account of the interrelated and interdependent textual developments and exchanges between cultures, which are by no means hermetically constituted, monolithic, static, or homogeneous, but rather ongoing and therefore of continued political and cultural relevance. This is, in fact, partly the reason why Saïd expressed a late interest in the scholarship of María Rosa Menocal, whose Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric and The Ornament of the World have examined the fruitful and overlapping features and connections between the Islamic Renaissance in al-Andalus in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and the Italian and Northern European Renaissance, which, it should be stressed, was entirely dependent on the archives of Islam and textual practices and interpretive strategies of studia abadiya for Europe’s putative “discovery” of the philosophical writings of Aristotle and others.

What this actually entails for Saïd in practice is not only a dialectically reflexive relationship to his own earlier work, which anyone who has managed to keep up with the extraordinary and ever-developing mass of his contributions will see at work an active process of constant revision and rethinking of his earlier claims – from “Traveling Theory” to “Traveling Theory Reconsidered,” from Orientalism to “Orientalism Reconsidered,” and so on – but also an intellectual dexterity that constantly works through the internal tensions, irreconcilabilities and discontinuities of the literary subjects he examines. All of these kinds of problems, Saïd argues, critics must raise not so much with the intention of providing an overarching solution or resolution to them, but by raising even more questions that are to be addressed, interrogated critically, skeptically, not according to some model or method, but as part of a willful human and humane endeavor, whose commitment can be expressed in terms of an embattled contradiction between his own particular human exertions struggling against the universalizing tendencies to negate those human ideals, against which the particular manages, almost by a sheer force of will, to stand and contest. “Thinking is not the intellectual reproduction of what already exists anyway”, Adorno (whose criticism Saïd admired and like to quote) writes. “Its insatiable aspect, its aversion to being quickly and easily satisfied, refuses the foolish wisdom of resignation. The utopian moment in thinking is the stronger the less it . . . objectifies itself into utopia and hence sabotages its realization.”

What all of this has to do with the difficulty of identifying or even locating a method lies partly in the demystifying, explanatory powers of Saïd who, in Orientalism and elsewhere, draws a series of tightly critical circles around the discursive object of the so-called Orient; yet insofar as his strategy is one of elaboration, it persistently denies objectifying itself as a method that can repeated and rehearsed, like some sort of chorus, over and over again. Much of Saïd’s intellectual exertions, in other words, are deeply shaped by his affiliation with Vico. As Saïd has argued in Beginnings, “Vico’s obsession with details…confirmed, even if it obscured, the human historical presence, just as his obsession also obscured [his—Vico’s] method. When Vico argued for a New Science, his tendency”, Saïd continues to say, “was to turn away from schematic methods …; instead he advocated a wideness of scope, broad comparisons, the love of detail linked to large universal principles. The power of Vico’s rhetoric always takes one away from method to knowledge as pathos, to [knowledge as] invention, to [knowledge as] imagination.”

In this way, Saïd’s vast ouevre is a work of an astonishing will and human achievement that continues and will continue, as long as we read and re-read him, to remain of so much importance precisely because such works cannot be repeated, precisely because they have constituted not a method, but a general critical attitude and critical consciousness that enables us to imagine, in the form of Orientalism’s antithesis, that someday we shall be free from the coercive and dominative forms of knowledge and power that have been exercised at an extraordinary cost to the experience and lived realities of human beings.

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Citation: Rubin, Andrew N.. "Orientalism". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 21 April 2005 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=14559, accessed 03 April 2025.]