Orientalisms Effect on Art and History - Essay Example

Commentary on Edward Said: Orientalism's Effect on Art and History from Safira Zeki's private collection Word Count: 3406 Page Count: 13 Introduction The Life of Edward Said Facts: Edward Said died September 24, 2003 of leukemia at age 67 Professor of English at Columbia University since 1963 Member of the Palestine National Council 1977 to 1991 Criticized Yasser Arafat after Oslo Accords in 1993 Criticized contemporary Arabic society for "all it's political failures, its human rights abuses, its stunning military incompetencies, its decreasing production, [and] the fact that alone of all modern peoples, we have receded in democratic and technological and scientific development." (McLemee 2003) Wrote dozens of books and articles every year from 1963-2002 Edward Said was a scholar and critical writer of postcolonial studies with an increasingly legendary status. A professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University, he was also a well-known activist in Middle Eastern politics. He was born in Jerusalem, Palestine in 1935. (Wikipedia 2006) In 1948, while Said was a grade school student (a private English school in Cairo) the state of Israel was created and 80% of the Palestinian population was left without a home, including Said's family. A privileged child, Said had little interest in the conflict. His family left and he did not return to Palestine until as an adult in 1990. After being expelled from Victoria College in Cairo for poor behavior he was sent to the United States, with citizenship in the US, and finished high school at a private boarding school in New England. He went to Princeton University to study English literature and history. His graduate studies were at Harvard. In 1992 he achieved University Professor at Columbia, their most prestigious position. The Suez Crisis made an impact on him as an Arab-Palestinian but he did not get involved. But the Israeli victory over the Arab forces in 1967 and the Israeli occupation of the last remaining Palestinian territories forced Said to take a political stance for the liberation of Palestine. In 1968 he wrote his first article about the Palestinian cause: The Arab Portrayed (Dexheimer 2002). While visiting his family in Beirut in '71, he got entrenched in the struggle for the liberation of Palestine as a part of a community of academics and writers who were involved in various colonial and postcolonial struggles. He translated the speeches of Yassir Arafat into English for the Western press, still not getting politically involved. But in 1977, he was elected to the exiled Palestinian National Congress. It was at this time that Said, as an academic in the field of comparative literature, began writing on contemporary Arab literature about figures such as Naguib Mahfouz, Elias Khouri, and the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (McLemee 2003). In 1975-1976 Said became a fellow at Stanford University and wrote Orientalism (1978), the book that made him famous. In the next three years he published Covering Islam (1981) and The Question of Palestine (1979), which, in conjunction with Orientalism, has been called his trilogy. This critique of Oriental Studies questioned everything about this subject that had been a scholarly pursuit at most of the well-known European universities for centuries. Said used his fame of the 1980-90's to further the cause of Palestine and advocate for human rights. In the 1980's Said lobbied the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to re-think the strategy of armed struggle for liberation and urged Palestinians and Arabs to understand the importance of mutual respect and co-existence with Israelis. He advocated a two-state solution. A temperate voice, he made many friends within Israel. This occurred despite his unsympathetic stance toward Israel (Wikipedia 2006). Said became a personal target of other conservative Jewish and Christian Zionists. Attacks on Said suggest an "orientalism" on the part of the right-wing Zionists. As an articulate Arab intellectual, Said was viewed as a threat. The Jewish Defense League called him a "Nazi" in 1995, and his office at Columbia was burned (Wikipedia 2006). Yet after breaking with Arafat in 1991, he became critical of the peace agreement between Israel and the PLO, and felt that the PLO "lacked credibility and moral authority." (Wikipedia 2006) Political and personal problems in the 1990's included being diagnosed with leukemia. During a long hospitalization he wrote a memoir. Out of Place relates the experiences of his youth and his feelings of exile. The leukemia went into remission, but it had taken a toll. He returned to Palestine (source). Said published his works on postcolonial study, Culture and Imperialism, in 1993, and in 1994, Representations of the Intellectual. These two books brought him again into prominence in the academic community (Sered 1996). Despite his illness, Edward Said continued his activism for peace, human rights and social justice. He traveled a lecture tour and also wrote a regular column for the Egyptian newspaper al-Ahram. Said has been contrasted to Franz Fanon, also an academic activist but with ideas of revolutionary violence (Windschuttle 1999). From the quantity of references to Edward Said and his Orientalism, it is obvious that he has made a huge impact on several generations of scholars and political personages. Orientalism Defined The history of Orientalism "Said makes the claim that the whole of Western European and American scholarship, literature, and cultural representation (art) and stereotype creates and reinforces prejudice against non-Western cultures, putting them in the classification of Oriental (or "Others")" (Windschuttle 1999). The main point Said makes of Orientalism is about the power relationship and how the Occident (Europeans and Americans, largely) uses the 'Orient' for its own purposes in its own terms. But the biggest way that Orientalism has affected whole populations of Western people is in their educations, where stories of Rudyard Kipling still enjoy great use in schoolrooms, as well as Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. The fantasy of Eastern life continues despite tons of information to the contrary. With the advent of current politics, the Persian, Arabic and Chinese cultures are not as popular in some respects, but the art of the Orientalist era lives on, persistently and seductively (Mitter 1994). "Oriental Studies" was an area of academic study in the 19th century. Scholars of the time believed that effective colonialisation relied on knowledge of the 'conquered peoples'. It was "knowledge is power" thinking. But, Said writes, the West had to create the East in order for this study to take place (Windschuttle 1999). According to Said, the West believed that the Orientals had no history or culture that was independent of the colonialists. Oriental Studies was comprised of philology, linguistics, ethnography, and the interpretation of culture through the discovery, recovery, compilation, and translation of Oriental texts. Said clarified that he was not attempting to cover all these areas. His focus was on how the English, French, and American scholars approached the Arab cultures of North Africa and the Middle East (Windschuttle 1999). Orientalism speaks more to the power the West than about the Orient itself. It was Said's assertion that the process of creating an image of the Orient and a body of knowledge about the Orient and then subjecting it to systematic study was the prototype for taking control of the Orient, politically and economically (Windschuttle 1999). The first part of the creation of the Orient was its geography, which according to scholars, covered most of the 'other' side of the world, the Middle East, India, China, and most all of Asia as one culture. Then the depiction of Orientals became commonly known as a people who were backward, weak, defenseless, and superstitious. They became the yin to our yang. The female to our male. This was how the West rationalized the domination of the Orient, as Said has written (Mitter 1994). The Western scholars had translated Oriental literature into English, so their translations became the common understanding of the Oriental culture. Every kind of literary figure and artist began portraying the Orient in these terms. Current Orientalism is more about Arabs who are thought to be irrational, menacing, untrustworthy, anti-Western, dishonest and often terrorists (Said 1978). Said wrote, "For every Orientalist, quite literally, there is a support system of staggering power, considering the ephemerality of the myths that Orientalism propagates. The system now culminates into the very institutions of the state. To write about the Arab Oriental world, therefore, is to write with the authority of a nation, and not with the affirmation of a strident ideology but with the unquestioning certainty of absolute truth backed by absolute force." (Sered 1996) He goes on to say, "This is the culmination of Orientalism as a dogma that not only degrades its subject matter but also blinds the practitioner." To reject Orientalism means rejecting the biological generalizations, the cultural constructs and the racial and religious prejudices, says Said. It erases the lines of demarcation between East and West (Said 1978). There are many critics of Said's writings, as would be imagined. Said's book, Orientialism, makes three major claims: The first claim is that Orientalism, although purporting to be an objective, disinterested, and rather esoteric field, in fact functions to serve political ends. Through this scholarship, as already mentioned, a country could justify taking over the East. He really believed that the learning came before the conquering (Windschuttle 1999). His second claim is that Orientalism helped define Europe's self-image (Windschuttle 1999). This is a point of great contention in that it is based on a Freudian notion that a being requires an "other" in order to have their own identity. Thirdly, Said argues that Orientalism has produced a false description of Arabs and Islamic culture. This is almost an obvious point, however, it is also questioned by many scholars. In the early part of the 1900's there was an excellent book written by Charles Lamb called the Crusades: The Flame of Islam (actually the 2nd of two books) that tried to explain the Crusades from both points of view, the Christian's and the Muslim's. The accessibility of the Arab world at this time afforded a lot of research into the cultures there, and the author did extensive research both in Europe and the Middle East from original texts. Many scholars over the centuries have honestly tried to find accurate ways to represent the East and its cultures and ideologies. The possibility is that their fundamental thinking had already been tainted by their own education's 'orientalism' and would overshadow all their efforts, no matter how honest. Writers such as Edward Said could provide a more effective grounding in their cultures, and help to right the wrongs that have been produced by the colonial scholars. The Effect of Orientalism on Art and Art History Historical Effects Orientalism in scholarship and the arts has appeared for two hundred years throughout the West: in painting , dance, sculpture, clothing, politics, anthropology, and literature. Fashion designer Erte was an Orientalist, and also, arguably, the artist Henri Matisse. There was a copywriter who created a romantic Oriental ad campaign for Murad Turkish cigarettes in the early 1900s. The ballet, Scheherezade, was Orientalist. Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, founders of modern dance, were Orientalists. Miguel de Cervantes, who wrote Don Quixote, is even considered an early Orientalist (Zeki 2006). The movie Casablanca might be considered Orientalist. The movie Jumanji is an old-fashioned Orientalist story. All of us are Orientalists (source). It is how we have been taught. Characteristics of Orientalism in art: Romance, as in false images Passion, more so than in conventional art Grandeur, regal scenes Deep colors, unusual patterns Stereotyped images Religious icons of misunderstood deities Fantastical creatures Ethnic people/clothing/architecture/decoration Exotic landscapes Artists of the era of Orientalism were inspired by stories they had heard or read, or by travels they had been on, and their perceptions of the Eastern cultures. Greatly exaggerated tales came from the East by way of military people, adventurers, traders and missionaries. Not realizing that the descriptions of different cultures overlapped or were misunderstood, many artists portrayed very unlikely scenes. The public could not get enough of this art. Soon it filled their homes, covered their sofas, hung on their walls, played on their phonographs and was hung in their closets. Image of an "Homme Carrefour" from Donald J. Cosentino's Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou [Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1995] The effect of the orientalism of Eastern cultures over the past two hundred years is enormous. Many famous images have been reproduced from this time of colonialization.(Zeki 2006). Special palettes of color were used for this art. Designs that had been seen in rugs or architecture were incorporated into many types of art and textile. How Orientalism has affected current day art and concepts By contrast to previous histories, newer texts on art history are clearly attempting to rectify the impact of orientalism by not mentioning it at all (Stokstad 2002). Instead there are statements about "the myth of primitive art" that talk about the implications gleaned from early Christian missionaries that African and Eastern civilizations were "frozen" in their development. "Heathen", "primitive" and other racist terms rooted in colonialism are noted as former ideas. According to Stokstad's text, "European visitors to Africa admired the politically and socially sophisticated urban centers of Benin and Luanda." In fact, the Art History text becomes more of a sociological and anthropological history as it delves into explanations of African, Middle Eastern and Chinese life. The text is carefully constructed so as to avoid any suggestion of Western bias. There would be those who may argue that this is not possible but my reading of it cannot find discernable reference to Western standards. Despite the exaggerations and complete fabrications that were produced by artists of the 1800's that supposedly depicted Eastern life, there has been a great audience appeal for this art. Some of the audience has become the people of the East, who have bought much of this art (Sered 1996). Their desire to have this art comes from a desire to own a part of their own past, even falsely represented. Another area of art that still presents the Oriental thinking is in the Western version of belly dance (Zeki 2006). Generally the concept is used to show the gracefulness and beauty of the dance, without knowing the actual background of the culture that created it, or the original purposes of the dance. Just as hoola skirts from Hawaii or headdresses from American natives have been replicated over the years, Eastern dance has also been enacted with little thought to its meaning. In 1998, the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney staged an exhibition entitled "Orientalism: From Delacroix to Klee." It contained 124 paintings and 50 photographs, most of which were produced by European artists in the 19th century on North African subjects. Notes published in the exhibition catalogue have as their aesthetic authority someone whose name is mentioned most frequently but is not, as one might expect, an art critic, is instead the literary critic, Edward Said. What the paintings confirmed, patrons were told, was Said's thesis about the "subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture" and "the aggressiveness necessitated by the colonial expansion of the European powers." (Sered 1996). Instead of asking how Orientalism affected art it might be of more importance today to ask how Edward Said impacted art and art history. The discussions about his influence are raging and will continue to have much importance in times to come. Today, twenty-five years after his work was first published, Said is widely regarded by students of literature and cultural studies not only as one of the founders of the postcolonial movement of criticism and multiculturalism in politics, but as one of their heroes. Said acknowledges that his work is not original. It was synthesized and elaborated from two different theses. The first was an analysis that came about by a number of Muslim academics who worked in Europe in the 1960's. Said cited the Coptic socialist author, Anwar Abdel Malek, who wrote in France using the latest Parisian versions of Freudian and Marxist theory. Malek accused the Orientalists of being "Europocentric," or of failing to pay enough attention to Arab scholars like himself, and being obsessed with the past, He wrote that these scholars stamped all Orientals with "a constitutive otherness, of an essentialist character." This essentialist conception about the Oriental people, Abdel Malek wrote, was seen through an "ethnist typology . . . and will soon proceed with it towards racism" (Windschuttle 1999). The second source of Said's analysis also came from Paris in the 1960's. The writing of Michel Foucault and his ideas that academic disciplines do not simply produce knowledge but also generate power were the basis for Said's critique of colonialism. If one were to look at current history-in-the-making to highlight this idea, the situation in Iraq, that started with some questionable information, might prove to validate Said's point of view. Without this "information", the conflict in Iraq may not have taken place. The religious problems between different factions of Iraq is also misunderstood by Westerners but could be compared to troubles in Ireland. (Windschuttle 1999). Said also borrowed from Foucault his notion of a "discourse," which scholarship has as its ideological framework. With discourse, "all representations are tainted by the language, culture, institutions, and political ambience of the representer." (Said 1978) There are many critics of Edward Said's thinking. Keith Windschuttle writes, strongly critical of Said, that it is not difficult to show that each of Said's three main claims about Orientalism is seriously flawed. He does not believe that Europe drew its identity from the backs of Eastern cultures. Nor does he believe that the entire body of scholarship in Europe has been this mistaken. One Muslim critic, Sadik Jalal al-'Azm, has argued that the kind of religious essentialism of which Said indicts Orientalism is actually necessary to understand the Muslim mind: [I]t is true that in general the unseen is more immediate and real to the common citizens of Cairo and Damascus than it is to the present inhabitants of New York and Paris; it is true that religion "means everything" to the life of the Moroccan peasants in a way that must remain incomprehensible to present day American farmers (Windschuttle 1999). And Bernard Lewis in his survey of European attitudes towards Islam since the Middle Ages, Islam and the West (1994) argues that Europe's initial theological and ethnic prejudices have been largely overcome within serious scholarship by the end of the 18th century after the study of Islam was established as an academic subject worthy of attention and respect : The Muslims were no longer seen purely in ethnic terms as hostile tribes, but as the carriers of a distinctive religion and civilization; their prophet was no longer a grotesque impostor or a Christian heretic but the founder of an independent and historically significant religious community (Windschuttle 1999). There can be no "truths," Said argues, only formations or deformations. No scholar or writer, or artist can rise above these limitations (Said 1978). This may or may not be an accurate assessment. But maybe the truth is that people don't want truth in art as much as they want their fantasies revealed. BELIEVE ONLY HALF OF WHAT YOU SEE AND NOTHING YOU HEAR - "Question everything, especially rumors."* Another saying to keep in mind is, "Consider the source." *The proverb has been traced back to 'Proverbs of Alfred' (c. 1300). First attested in the United States in 1770. In 1845, it was used by American poet Edgar Allen Poe (1809-49)." From "Random House Dictionary of Popular Proverbs and Sayings" by Gregory Y. Titelman (Random House, New York, 1996). References Dexheimer, Jim (2002) Retrieved 4/20/06 from http://www.wmich.edu/dialogues/texts/orientalism.htm McLemee, Scott (2003) Retrieved 4.20/06 from http://chronicle.com/free/2003/09/2003092603n.htm Mitter, Partha, (1999) Decadent Art of South Indian temples, Catherine King - ed., Views of Difference: Different Views of Art. New Haven and London, Pp. 93-118 Said, Edward. (1978) Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, Pantheon, revised edition Penguin, 1995. Pp. 4/7/9 Sered, Danielle. (1996) Retrieved 4/20/06 from http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Orientalism.html Stokstad, Marilyn. (2002) Art History. UofK. Harry Abrams. New York. Pg. 477 Windschuttle, K. (1999) Review of "Orientalism revisited". The New Criterion Vol. 17, No. 5, Retrieved 4.20/06 from www.newcriterion.com/archive/17/jan99/said.htm Wikipedia contributors (2006). Internet activism. Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 22:09, March 7, 2006 from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.phptitle=Internet_activism&oldid=42275912. (a listing of) Works by Said (1995) Retrieved 4/20/06 from http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/scctr/Wellek/said/1994.html#xtocid2797830 Zeki, Safira. (2006) Retrieved 4/20/06 from http://www.dancewichita.com/wbd/vision/orientalism.html Read More