Speaking of Sayyid, the first thing most people think of is "Orientalism". It can be said that "Orientalism", as Said's most influential concept, has become the framework for the "West" to understand the "East" since its publication in 1978, and has also opened up a broad soil for the study of postcolonial theory.
Half a century has passed, and the debate and interpretation around Orientalism are still continuing. This also somewhat obscures Said's other ideas, such as the "worldliness" of the text, and the cosmopolitan humanism that he mixes with. In the newly published book Introduction to Sayyid, the author provides us with a map to understand Sayyid's key ideas.
Introduction to Sayyid (2nd Edition), by Bill Ashklovt/[Australian] Par Aluvalia, translated by Wang Liqiu, by Badya | Chongqing University Press, December 2020.
The original author | [Australian] Bill Ashcroft /[Australian] Par Aluvaria
Excerpts | Qingqingzi
The Origin of "Orientalism": Constructing the Orient in the process of understanding the Orient
In 1786, William Jones, a judge of the High Court of Bengal and a Sanskrit scholar, gave a speech to the Bengal Asiatic Society, in which he said something that was about to change the face of intellectual life in Europe:
Sanskrit, whatever its archaic form, has a wonderful structure, more perfect than Greek, richer than Latin, more refined than either, yet very similar in roots and grammatical form, and this similarity cannot be accidental; indeed, they are so similar that any linguist who examines these three languages cannot help but believe that they may have originated from a common source which may no longer exist. (Asiatic Researches 1788, quoted in Poliakov 1974:190)
Jones's remarks sparked an "Indian fever" throughout Europe, with scholars flocking to Sanskrit to find the origins of European languages that are even more historically hidden than Latin and Greek. After the Indian fever, Orientalism was firmly established, and language studies were greatly expanded. Over the next century, European ethnologists, linguists, and historians will be obsessed with Eastern and Indo-European languages, which appear to offer some sort of explanation for the roots of European civilization itself.
Jones's remarks were revolutionary because the existing conception of the history of language assumed that language development had taken place in the 6,000 years since creation, that Hebrew was the source language, and that other languages had developed through a process of degeneration. Jones's manifesto introduced a new conception of the history of language, but because language was so profoundly implicit in considerations of national and cultural identity, "the real and useful science of language was engulfed by the mad doctrine of 'racial anthropology'" (Poliakov 1974:193). The association of language and identity, especially the diversity of languages and the diversity of ethnic identities, led to the discipline of ethnology, the predecessor of modern anthropology.
According to Sayyid, Orientalism is primarily a way of defining and "locating" the Other in Europe. But as a set of interrelated disciplines, Orientalism is also about Europe itself in many important ways, with arguments centered around national identity, ethnicity, and linguistic origins. Therefore, the exhaustive and meticulous examination of the languages, histories and cultures of the East takes place in the context in which the superiority and importance of European civilization are not questioned. This is the power of the discourse that was quickly produced by influential scholars as the truth that was accepted. For example, the influential French and literary scholar and historian Ernest Renan (1823-1892) can confidently declare that "everyone, no matter how unfamiliar with the affairs of our time, will clearly see that in fact, the Muhammadist state is inferior" (Renan 1896:85). We can clearly see the nature of Lernan's audience, and the cultural assumptions it shares:
Anyone who has been to the East or Africa will be struck by the fact that the iron hoops on the head of a true believer fatally limit his mind, causing him to completely enclose himself in the face of knowledge. （Renan 1896：85）
The confidence behind such assertions is partly indicative of the confidence that the widespread popularity of writers like Lenan and the philologist and race theorist Count Arthur Gobineau (1816-1882) brought to people. But on a deeper level, these writers themselves are the product of the unquestioned domination of Europe over most of the rest of the world, which is maintained economically and militarily. Through these statements, like Lernan's words, the "production" of Orientalist knowledge becomes a continuous, uncritical "reproduction" of assumptions and beliefs. Thus, in 1908, Lord Cramer, who relied heavily on writers like Lenan, was able to write that Europeans "trained intellect works like machinery", while the minds of the Orientals, like their picturesque streets, are extremely lacking in symmetry ( Said 1978a: 38). The superior "order", "rationality" and "symmetry" of Europe and the inferior "disorder", "irrationality" and "primitivism" of Europe are self-affirming norms in which all kinds of oriental studies are scattered. But giving these disciplines their impetus and urgency (at least in the beginning) was the need to explain the apparent historical connection between Europe and its Eastern ancestors. "Orient" means, presumably what we mean today, "the Middle East," and includes the various "Semitic" languages and societies, as well as the societies of South Asia, because these societies are most relevant to the development and spread of Indo-European languages, although, as Said pointed out, Orientalists also tend to distinguish between the "good" East in ancient India and the "bad" East in today's Asia and North Africa (Said 1978a:99).
The identification of Indo-European languages has had immeasurable consequences in the history of the world. Not only did it disrupt conventional notions of linguistic history, it also caused a century of philological debate, but with the confluence of language and race, it soon spawned a variety of theories about the origin and development of race. The Indo-European languages, known at different times as "Yaf" languages (named after Noah's son Japheth, as distinct from the "Semitic" and "Semitic" languages of Noah's other sons, Shem and Han) or "Indo-Germanic" languages, began to be called "Aryans" – because they are believed to have originated near Lake Arya in Asia. In 1819, through the efforts of the German philosopher Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829), the term "Aryan" gained wide authority (Poliakov 1974:193). The term became a symbol of an idea close to the heart of the European state that an independent language meant an independent racial/ethnic origin. In the early 19th century, while using the myth of the Aryan race to inspire German youth, Schlegel's rhetoric set in motion a process that would eventually lead to the Holocaust of World War II. Thus, this concept of the potential of peoples that were originally unified and widely culturally diverse—Indo-European language communities, diverse peoples such as Indians, Persians, Teutonics, and Anglo-Saxons—became the root cause of the most aggressive racial polarization while satisfying the deep-seated racial egos of Europeans.
It is tempting to regard Orientalism merely as a product of the development of modern imperialism in the 19th century, for European control of the Orient does require it to give an intellectual justification for its cultural and economic domination. But discourse is, we might say, "overdetermined": that is, many different factors have contributed to the development of this particular ideological construct at this time in history, and imperialism in the emerging European countries is only one of these factors (albeit a significant one). The tributaries of these influences also varied with the state, for example, the political economy of British industrial domination and its colonial appropriation; the sense of national destiny after the French Revolution; and the centuries-long emphasis on blood in the Teutonic community in Germany. Taken together, all of this produces a passion for the study of Oriental culture, which has also witnessed the birth of new natural and human sciences disciplines such as ethnology, anthropology, paleontology, and philology, as well as the deformation or formalization of existing disciplines such as history and geography. The intellectual disciplines contained in Orientalism are also far from monolithic, on the contrary, the diversity of these disciplines, and the "multi-factor determination" of the different cultural histories of the major European countries means that Orientalism has also developed different intellectual styles.
But while the disciplines of Orientalism are complex and diverse, the work of Orientalists also operates within specific norms, such as the assumption that Western civilization is the culmination of historical development. Thus, Orientalist analysis almost always further affirms the "primitive", "primitive", "exotic" and "mystical" nature of Eastern society, and often concludes the degeneration of the "non-European" branch of the Indo-European language family. In this respect, Orientalism, though it has given rise to many disciplines, can be seen as foucault's "discourse": a coherent, well-defined field of social knowledge; a system of statements by which people perceive the world.
There are unwritten (and sometimes unconscious) rules in discourse that define what can and cannot be said, and There are many such rules that operate in the realm of conventions, habits, expectations, and assumptions. In all attempts to acquire knowledge of the world, what is known is determined to a great extent by the way in which it is known; the rules of a discipline determine what kind of knowledge one can acquire from it, and the strength of these rules and their unspoken nature also indicate that the academic discipline is a discourse of archetypal form. But when these rules run through multiple disciplines and provide boundaries that define the production of such knowledge, that intellectual habit of speaking and thinking becomes a discourse like Orientalism. This argument in favor of the discursive coherence of Orientalism is the key to Sayyid's analysis of phenomena and the source of the persuasiveness of his arguments. European knowledge, by constantly constructing its object within the discourse of Orientalism, was able to maintain its hegemony over that object. Focusing his attention on one aspect of the complex phenomenon of Orientalism enables Sayyid to expound Orientalism as one of the most profound examples of the mechanism of cultural domination, as a metaphor for imperial control and the process of control that continues to influence contemporary life today. Thus, the core of Orientalism is to show the connection between knowledge and power, because Orientalist discourse constructs and dominates the East in the process of "knowing" it.
The Living Nature of Orientalism: Reversing the "Gaze" of Discourse from the Perspective of "Orientals"
Orientalism is an unabashedly political work. Its aim is not to study the series of disciplines, nor to elaborate in detail the history or origin of Orientalism, but rather to reverse the "gaze" of discourse, to analyze it from the point of view of an "Orientalist" - "to enumerate the traces of that culture on the Eastern subject... That domination of culture is a powerful fact in the lives of all Orientals" (Said 1978a:25). The fact that Sayyid, a famous American scholar, was able to claim to be an "Oriental" repeats once again the recurring contradiction that runs through his work. But his life experience in the United States (in the United States, "Orient" means danger and threat) is the source of the viability of Orientalism. The origin of the book demonstrates the profound influence of Orientalist discourse, as it comes directly from the "frustrating" life of an Arab Palestinian in the West.
Indeed, the web of racism, cultural clichés, political imperialism, dehumanizing ideologies of Arabs or Muslims is so strong that every Palestinian will feel the exhausting fate unique to this web... Therefore, for me, the creation of the "Orient" and in a sense the web of knowledge and power that dehumanizes them is not entirely an academic question. It is also a matter of intellectual importance that has some very obvious importance. （Said 1978a：27）
As we have seen, Orientalism is the fruit of Sayyid's own "unique and exhausting destiny." In the book, a Palestinian Arab living in the United States uses his emigrant position as professor to discern how cultural hegemony is maintained. His intention, he said, was provocative and thus stimulated "a new way of dealing with the East" (Said 1978a:28). Indeed, if this binary opposition between the "East" and the "West" disappears completely, then "we will take a few steps forward in what the Welsh Marxist cultural critic Raymond Williams called the 'unlearning' of the 'inherent mode of domination'" (Said 1978a:28).
Sayyid's own work on identity construction cemented the passion behind Orientalism. The intellectual power of the book derives from its inspired, sustained and focused analysis of the ways in which the various disciplines operate within specific coherent discursive limits, but the cultural, and perhaps even emotional, power of the book comes from its "living" immediacy, which comes from the fact that it was produced by a writer whose identity was partly constructed for this discourse, and who to this day still feels the influence of Orientalist "knowledge." Passion can be a confusing, non-reflective element in intellectual debates, and while passion undoubtedly explains the popularity of Orientalism to a large extent, many critics who refuse to consider the book's relevance (because of the passion element in the book) often limit their understanding of the book's significance. For example, Basim Musallam, an Arab commentator on the book, notes that a hostile critic, the scholar Michael Rustum, "wrote as a free man and a member of a free society; as an Arabic-speaking Syrian citizen of an independent and autonomous Ottoman state" (Said 1995a:337). But Edward Said "has no recognized identity," Musalaam said, "and his people are still arguing." It is possible that edward said and his generation were no more grounded than the remnants of Michael Rustam's ruined society in Syria, and it is possible that they relied on only memory." Musaram points out the key point: "This book was written not just by a random 'Arab', but also by an Arab with a specific background and experience. (Musallam, quoted in Said 1995a:337-8)
The Arabs by Bashim Musalam
But to say that Sayyid's intentions are simply to vent his anger while defending a (Palestinian) nationalism that will exclude him and other colonized subjects from the experience and legacy of colonization would be too simplistic. Such a position is abhorrent to his view of the "secular" role of public intellectuals—in Sayyid's view, public intellectuals are trying to "tell the truth about power" by opening up space and crossing borders. Saeed took over Franz Fanon's unfinished plan and moved from a politics of accusations to a politics of liberation. However, as he has already pointed out, despite his statements about what he sees as what his work will be devoted to—creating a non-coercive, non-dominant, and non-essentialist knowledge—"more often" Orientalism "is seen as some affirmation of a subordinate status—the recollection of the suffering people of the earth—rather than a multicultural critique of the use of knowledge to promote their own power" (Said 1995a:336).
Before the publication of Orientalism, the term "Orientalism" itself was no longer a popular term, but in the late 1970s it gained a vibrant new life. The various disciplines of modern Oriental studies, though complex, are inevitably indoctrinated with traditional reproductions of the nature of the Orient (especially the Middle East) and the assumptions that underpin the discourse of Orientalism. Although Said also lamented that sometimes the appropriation of Orientalism was too arbitrary, there is no doubt that the appropriation of Orientalism had a great influence on social theory in general. By 1995, Orientalism had become a "collective book" that had unexpectedly "abolished" its authors (Said 1995a:300). You might also add that Orientalism is also a book of continuous growth in terms of the analysis of Orientalist strategies that have been useful in identifying the various specific discursive and cultural operations of imperial culture. For these analyses deal primarily with the ideology of reproduction and how the reproduction of power (though by their very nature stereotypical and exaggerated descriptions) becomes "real" and accepted reproduction.
Scope of Orientalism: The Orient as a stage theater attached to Europe
At the heart of Said's argument was the link between knowledge and power, as prime minister Arthur Belfort's defense of the British occupation of Egypt in 1910 clearly demonstrated. At that time, Balfour declared, "We know more about Egyptian civilization than we know about any other country" (Said 1978a:32). For Belfort, knowledge means not only a comprehensive overview of a civilization from its origins, but also the ability to do so. "There is such a degree of awareness of something [like Egypt], that is, dominating it, having authority over it ... For we know it, and in a sense, it exists as we know it" (Said 1978a:32). The premise of Belfort's remarks clearly shows how knowledge and domination go hand in hand:
Britain knew Egypt; Egypt was what Britain knew it was; Britain knew that Egypt could not be self-governing; Britain affirmed this through its occupation of Egypt; for the Egyptians Egypt was what Britain had occupied and was now governing; thus foreign occupation became the "foundation itself" of contemporary Egyptian civilization. （Said 1978a：34）
But to see that Orientalism is a rationalized explanation of colonial rule is to ignore the fact that colonialism was justified in orientalism beforehand (Said 1978a:39). The division between East and West in the world has been brewing for centuries, and it expresses a fundamental dichotomy on which people deal with the East. But in this dichotomy, only one side has the power to decide what the reality of the East and the West might look like. Because knowledge of the Orient is generated from this cultural force, "in a sense it created the Orient, the Orientals, and their world" (Said 1978a:40). This assertion brings us directly to the heart of Orientalism, and as a result, it also gives us a glimpse of the roots of much of the controversy it has provoked. For Said, the Orient and the Orientals were directly constructed by Europeans in their various disciplines by which they knew them. This seems to reduce an extremely complex European phenomenon to a simple question of power and imperial relations, but on the other hand does not provide any space for the self-reproduction of the East.
Sayyid points out that the surge in oriental studies coincides chronologically with a period of unprecedented European expansion: from 1815 to 1914. He stressed that by focusing on the beginnings of modern Orientalism, we can see the political nature of Orientalism. And this beginning lies not in William Jones's disruption of linguistic orthodoxy, but in Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798, which "from many points of view is itself the model of the truly scientific appropriation of another culture that is distinctly more powerful" (Said 1978a:42). But the key fact is that Orientalism, as far as all its tributaries are concerned, begins to impose restrictions on ideas about the Orient. Even powerful and imaginative writers like Gustav Flaubert, Gérard de Naival or Sir Walter Scott were limited in what they could experience and say about the East. For "Orientalism is, in the end, a political imagination of reality, structured to promote the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, 'we') and the unfamiliar (the Orientalist East, the East of the world, 'them') (Said 1978a:43). It plays such a role because the intellectual achievements of Orientalist discourse serve and are themselves subject to, a vast hierarchical network of imperial power.
The key to the emergence of discourse is the imaginary existence of something called the "Orient", which was formed in what Sayyid called the "Geography of Imagination", because it is not that we can develop a discipline called "Oriental Studies". Quite simply, the idea of the East exists to define what is European. "A distinction as great as the distinction between the West and the East leads to other, smaller distinctions" (Said 1978a:58) and the experience of writers, travelers, soldiers, and statesmen descending from Herodotus and Alexander the Great becomes "the lens through which people experience the West, which shapes the language of the encounter between the East and the West, the perception of the encounter, and the form of the encounter" (Said 1978a:58). What aggregates these experiences is a shared sense of something "other," something called the Orient. This analysis of the duality of Orientalism has been the source of much of the criticism that the book has received, as it appears to imply the existence of a Europe or a West (a "we"), and that unitary Europe or West or "we" constructed the East. But if we regard this homogenization as an orientalist discourse, at least as a way of implicitly simplifying the world, rather than as a way of real existence of the world; as a way in which a universal attitude relates to various disciplines and branches of intellect (albeit in different subjects and modes of operation of these disciplines and branches of intellect), then we can understand the discursive power of this ubiquitous thinking and the habits of so-called orientalism.
After Sayyid, compiled by Bashir Abu-Maneh
Through the metaphor of theater, we can illustrate the way we understand the "Other" in this binary, stereotypical understanding of the "Oriental." The concept of Orientalism as a field of learning implies an enclosed space, and the concept of reproduction is theatrical: the Orientalism of Orientalism is a stage, and the East of the whole world is confined to this stage.
On this stage there will be such figures, who come from a larger whole, and whose role is to represent/reproduce that whole. Thus, the East does not seem to be an infinite (geographical) extension outside the familiar European world, but rather a closed field, a theatrical stage attached to Europe. （Said 1978a：63）
Imaginary geography gives legitimacy to a set of vocabulary, a representative/reproducible discourse, that is characteristic of the understanding of the East, and this set of vocabulary and discourse becomes the only way people know the East. Orientalism thus becomes a form of "radical realism" through which one aspect of the Orient is fixed by a word or phrase, "and then the word or phrase is considered to acquire reality, or more simply, reality itself" (Said 1978a:72).
The focus of Said's analysis is provided by the close correlation he saw between the rapid development of Orientalism in the 19th century and the rise of European imperialist domination. By giving importance to the events of Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798, we can see the political orientation of his analysis. Although not the beginning of the Orientalism that swept Europe in the early 19th century, Napoleon's plan did demonstrate the most conscious marriage between academic knowledge and political ambition. Of course, the decision made by the Governor-General of India in the 1870s to organize India's court system on the basis of Sanskrit paved the way for the discovery of William Jones, who helped translate Sanskrit. This shows that any kind of knowledge has a place, and its power comes from the political reality in which it finds itself. But Napoleon's strategy—convincing the Egyptians that he was fighting for Islam, not against It—drew on all the available knowledge of the Qur'an and Islamic society that French scholars could muster, and it demonstrated the strategy and strategic power of knowledge in a comprehensive way.
After leaving Egypt, Napoleon gave his aide-de-camp Krebel strict instructions to govern Egypt forever through Orientalists and islamic religious leaders they could win over (Said 1978a:82). According to Sayyid, the consequences of this expedition were profound. "Quite precisely, the occupation elicits the entire modern experience of the East: one interprets this experience from within the discursive universe that Napoleon established in Egypt." (Said 1978a:87) Said says that after Napoleon, the language of Orientalism itself underwent a fundamental change. "Its descriptive realism has been upgraded, and after the upgrade it has ceased to be merely a style of reproduction, but also a language, but also a means of creation" (Said 1978a: 87), symbolized by the ambitious construction of the Suez Canal. Claims like these show why Said's argument is so convincing and why it captured the imagination of critics in the 1970s. A more nuanced investigation will reveal that much of the most intensive study of Orientalism takes place in countries like Germany, which have few colonies. A broader analysis would also reveal that a wide variety of reproduction styles emerged in the field of Orientalism. But Napoleon's expeditions pointed an unmistakable direction to the work of orientalists, who left a legacy that continues to be passed down not only in the history of Europe and the Middle East, but also in the history of the world.
Fundamentally, the Oriental Society has such power and such an unparalleled capacity because of its emphasis on textuality, its tendency to intervene in reality within the framework of knowledge acquired from previously written texts. Orientalism is an intensive, multi-layered writing that claims to intervene directly with their objects, but in fact responds to previous writing, building on the basis of previous writing. This textual attitude continues to this day,
If the Arabs of Palestine oppose the Israeli settlement and the occupation of their land, then this is nothing more than a "return of Islam" or, as a famous contemporary Orientalist explained, merely a principle of Islam that was enshrined in the 7th century, namely, Islam's opposition to non-Islamic peoples. （Said 1978a：107）
The Discourse of Orientalism: A Manifestation of Power/Knowledge
We would do well to see Orientalism as a discourse from Foucault's point of view: an expression of power/knowledge. It is impossible, says Saeed, to understand "the very systematic discipline of the Post-Enlightenment in which European culture governed—even productive—the Orient in a political, sociological, military, ideological, scientific, and imaginative sense" (Said 1978a:3).
Then the concept of discourse that we saw earlier goes on to say that colonial discourse is a system of statements that people can make about colonies and colonial peoples, about colonial powers, about the relationship between the two. It is a system of knowledge and belief about that world in which the act of colonization takes place.
Although it was generated in the society and culture of the colonizers, it became a discourse in which the colonized would also see themselves within that discourse (as when Africans accepted the Empire's view of them, considered themselves "intuitive" and "emotional" and concluded that they were different from "rational" and "non-emotional" Europeans). At the very least, it also creates a deep conflict in the consciousness of the colonized, because it is in conflict with other knowledge about the world.
As a discourse, Orientalism is given the authority of the academy, the institution, and the government; this authority raises the discourse to an important, noble level; and the importance and privilege that discourse thus acquires guarantees its equivalence with "truth." Over time, the knowledge and reality created by the discipline of Orientalism produce a discourse—and "what is really responsible for the text produced from it (Orientalism) is not the originality of a given author, but the presence or weight of its substance" (Said 1978a:94). Through this discourse, Sayyid argues, The Cultural Institutions of the West are responsible for the creation of the "Other," the Easterners, and that these differences between the Other and the East and the West help establish the dualistic opposition on which Europe establishes its own identity. Underpinning this divide is the line between East and West that is "not so much a natural fact as a fact of human production" (Said 1985:2). At the heart of the construction of entities like the "East" is the geographical imagination. It requires the maintenance of strict borders to distinguish between East and West. Thus, through this process, they all acquire the ability to "orientalize" that region.
Of course, an indispensable part of Orientalism is the power relationship between the West and the East, in which the former (i.e., the West) prevails. This power is closely related to the construction of knowledge about the East. It happens because knowledge of the "vassal races" or "Orientals" makes it easy and profitable to manage them; "knowledge brings power, more power demands more knowledge, and so on—there is an increasingly lucrative dialectic between information and control" (Said 1978a:36).
The knowledge of the Orient created by the discourse of Orientalism, embedded in Orientalism, plays a role in constructing an image of the East and the Orientals that are subordinate to and subordinate to the domination of the West. Sayyid said that knowledge about the East, because it is generated by power, also creates the East, the Orientals and their world in a sense.
In the language of Cromer and Belfort, orientals are described as something you can judge (as in a courtroom), something you can study and depict (as in a school curriculum), something you can discipline (as in a school or prison), and something you can illustrate with pictures (as in a zoobook). The point is that, in each case, the East is controlled and represented/reproduced by the dominant framework. （Said 1978a：40）
It is necessary to create the East as the "other" so that the West can define itself and strengthen its identity by invoking such a term of contrast.
The reproduction of Orientalism is reinforced not only by academic disciplines such as anthropology, history, and linguistics, but also by "Darwin's treatise on survival and natural selection" (Said 1978a:227). Therefore, from the perspective of Orientalism, the study of the East is always from the perspective of a Westerner or a Western. According to Said, for Westerners,
The East is always similar to a certain aspect of the West, for example, for some German Romantics, the religion of India is essentially the Eastern version of Germanic Christian pantheism. The Orientalist, on the other hand, regards this—he is forever transforming the East from one thing to another—his own work: he does it for himself, for his own culture. （Said 1978a：67）
This encoding of the East, and the comparison of the East with the West, ultimately ensures this: the culture and perspective of the East is seen as a deviation, a perversion, and thus a low status.
An essential feature of Orientalist discourse is the objectification of the Orient and the Orientals. They are all treated as objects that can be examined and understood, and this objectification is confirmed in the term "Orient"—"The East" encompasses an entire geographical area and a large population, many times larger than Europe and many times more diverse than Europe. Such objectification leads to the assumption that the East is essentially monolithic and its history is static; when in fact, the East is dynamic and its history is active. In addition, The Orientals and Orientals were also regarded as passive, non-participatory research subjects.
But this construction also has a unique political dimension to the extent that Western knowledge will inevitably lead to political significance. This is best exemplified by the rise of Eastern studies and the rise of Western imperialism. In the 19th century, the British in India or Egypt became interested in the countries they discovered and became British colonies. This may seem quite different from saying that all scholarship about India and Egypt has been in some way tainted, engraved, and violated by disgusting political facts, "but that's what I'm going to say in this study of Orientalism" (Said 1978a:11). Sayyid is able to say this because he firmly believes that this discourse is alive: "No knowledge production in the humanities can ignore or deny the participation of its author as a human subject in his own situation." ”（Said 1978a：11）。 The notion that academic knowledge is "tainted", "imprinted", and "violated" by political and military forces does not mean that, as Dennis Porter (1983) pointed out, the hegemonic influence of Orientalist discourse does not operate through "consent." Rather, it says that in the context of colonialism, the pursuit of knowledge, which seems morally neutral, is in fact fraught with imperialist ideological assumptions. "Knowledge" is always a question of reproduction, and reproduction is a process that gives concrete form to ideological concepts, so that specific signifiers represent specific references. The power that underpins these reappearances is inseparable from the operation of political power, even if it is a different kind of power, a more subtle, more penetrating, and less visible power.
Culture and Imperialism, [American] Edward M. W. Sayyid, translated by Li Kun, Life, Reading, and New Knowledge Triptych Bookstore, October 2003.
Thus, the imbalance of power exists not only in the most obvious features of imperialism, in its "barbaric political, economic and military fundamentals" (Said 1978a:12), but also most hegemonically in its cultural discourse. In the cultural sphere we can identify the orientalist research programs that are used to propagate the hegemony of imperialist goals. Thus, Sayyid's methodology is embedded in what he calls "textualism," which allows him to conceive of the East as the creation of a text. In the discourse of Orientalism, the recognition of the text compels it to produce the West as a place and center of power distinct from the "other" as the object of knowledge and, inevitably subordinate. The hidden political function of the Orientalist text is a feature of its existentiality, and Sayyid's plan is to focus on the establishment of the Orient as a textual construct. He was not interested in analyzing what was hidden in Orientalist texts, but in showing how orientalists "made the East speak, described the East, explained its mysteries to the West, to the West" (Said 1978a:20-1).
The problem of reproduction is the key to understanding discourse,in which knowledge is always constructed—because Sayyid says that real reproduction cannot always be problematic (Said 1978a:272). If all reproduction is embedded in the language, culture, and institution of the replayer, "then we must be prepared to accept the fact that the reproduction itself (eoiPSo) is implicated, intertwined, nested, and intertwined with many other things besides 'truth', and that the so-called 'truth' itself is a reproduction" (Said 1978a:272). That belief—the belief that a representation, as we find in the book, corresponds to the real world—is what Sayyid calls the "attitude of the text." He points out that the French philosopher VoltAire (1694-1778), in Gandide, and the Spanish novelist Cervantes (1547-1616), satirized in Don Quixote, precisely this assumption: "We can understand the unpredictable, conjunctive chaos that comes with life on the basis of what the book-text says, and in which human beings live." (Said 1978A:93) Exactly, what happened was precisely what happened when people thought that the text of Orientalism meant and reproduced the truth: the East was forced into silence, and its reality was exposed by Orientalists. Because Orientalist texts offer a familiarity or even closeness to a distant and exotic reality, the texts themselves are given a very high status and acquire greater importance than the objects they seek to describe. Sayyid argued that "such texts create not only knowledge, but also the reality they seem to describe" (Said 1978A:94). As a result, given that the Orientals themselves are forbidden to speak, it is these texts that create and describe the reality of the East.
The latest phase of Orientalism corresponds to the place of the United States in replacing France and Britain on the world stage. Although the center of power shifted and the strategy of Orientalism changed with it, the discourse of Orientalism has been solid in its three general models. At this stage, Arab Muslims have taken center stage in popular American imagery and in the social sciences. Sayyid argues that this is largely due to the "popular Anti-Semitics" (Anti-Semitic) The hostility of Semiti C) shifted from the Jews to the Arabs... For this image is essentially the same" (Said 1978a:286). The dominance of the social sciences after World War II meant that the mantle of Orientalism was passed on to the social sciences. These social scientists ensure that the region is "conceptually weakened, reduced to 'attitudes', 'trends', data: in short, dehumanizing" (Said 1978a:291). Thus, Orientalism, at several different stages of it, is a european-centric discourse that constructs the "East" through the knowledge accumulated by generations of scholars and writers who have always enjoyed the power brought about by their "superior" wisdom. Said's intention was not only to document the excesses of Orientalism (although he was very successful in this regard), but also to emphasize the need for an alternative, better scholarship. He recognized that there were also many individual scholars involved in the production of such knowledge. But he was concerned with the "guild tradition" of Orientalism, which had the power to corrupt most scholars. He urged people to remain vigilant in the struggle against the domination of Orientalism. For Said, the answer is "to be sensitive to what is involved in reproducing, studying the other, racial thought, accepting authority and authority without thinking and critically, the social and political role of intellectuals, and the great value of skeptical critical consciousness" (Said 1978a: 327). Here, the supreme duty of the intellectuals is to resist the temptation of the "theological" position of what is implicit in the tradition of Orientalist discourse, to emphasize the "secular" desire to tell the truth about power, to question and oppose.
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Source: Beijing News