Edward Said on 'Orientalism'

• Executive Producer and Director: Sut Jhally
• Producer and Editor: Sanjay Talreja
• Assistant Editor: Jeremy Smith

          Featuring an interview with Edward Said Professor, Columbia University and author of Orientalism.

          Introduced by Sut Jhally University of Massachusetts-Amherst

          In this interview the points are mainly covered are as under:

            1)  Introduction (Montage of entertainment and news images

            2)  The Repertory of Orientalism

            3)  Orientalism and Empire

            4)  American Orientalism

            5)  Orientalism Today - The Demonization of Islam in the News and Popular Culture

            6)  Orientalism in Action - The Media & the Okiahoma City Bomb

            7)  Orientalism and The Palestinian Question       

          Edward Said's 'Orientalism' was published in 1978 and it's mainly based on the ground of assumptions and on the academic field of oriental studies. It is mainly portray East and West with the Western structuring of the orient as other. Said analyses central Western texts in order to account for the way the conception of The East was crystallized. This conception, according to Said, prepared the

ground for the political and cultural occupation of the non-Western regions by the West.

          Said's analysis in Orientalism is on the thought of Michel Foucault and especially his thoughts on the concept of discourse and the knowledge/power equation. Another influence found in Orientalism is the concept of hegemony derived from the philosophy of Antonio Gramsci. Using this terminology Said shows how Orientalism served as a system of representations which served to consolidate the West's authority and supremacy over the East, and not just to reflect or describe it.

          One of the main implications of Said's work is that even and maybe especially scholarly research about the orient is in fact deeply political in being an essential part of the imperialist mechanism of control and exploitation. Said's book became a central text of post colonialism since it seeks to expose the fundamental principles and structures of colonialism embedded within different systems of knowledge and representation.

Israel - Palestinian Issue:

          As a public intellectual, Said was a controversial member of the Palestinian National Council, because he publicly criticized Israel and the Arab countries, especially the political and cultural policies of Muslim regimes who acted against the national interests of their peoples. Said advocated the establishment of a Palestinian state to ensure equal political and human rights for the Palestinians in Israel, including the right of return to the homeland. To begin with the theory of Orientalism itself, Said proposes that throughout the history of colonialism, those coming from the colonial metropolises created discourse frameworks that set up those living in the colonies as systematically inferior individuals who were, in all cases, fictitiously painted as the binary opposites of Western colonialist. Thus, while the colonialists perceived themselves as rational, they painted the dwellers of the colonies as impulsive and irrational. While the colonialists perceived themselves as reasoned and enlightened saviors, the dwellers of the colonies were constructed as heathens.