Edward Said’s The Discourse of the Orient

Hari ini saya mendapat pencerahan tentang Post Colonialism. Saya baru tahu lho, kalau istilah Oriental itu bukan cuma tentang Bebek Peking atau Saus Tiram :O Ternyata istilah oriental itu merefleksikan dominasi Barat terhadap Timur, bagaimana dunia ini terbagi antara Barat, yang lebih kecil tapi kekuasaannya lebih besar, dan Timur, yang lebih luas tapi kemampuannya untuk menolak hegemony Barat sangat lemah.

Tugas F.O.E. Literature mingguan kali ini menghantarkan saya dengan seorang Edward Said, kritikus dan berdarah Palestina-Amerika yang berkutat dalam diskursus Post Colonialism, Orientalism, dan The Other. Di bawah ini adalah ringkasan terburu-buru yang saya buat tadi pagi. Semoga ada banyak masukan untuk diskusi ini :)

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This excerpt of Said’s book opens my mind that the Oriental is not simply a group of things related with the culture of East Asia. In fact, the term reflects a complex chain of hegemony. In this writing, Said opens by describing the Orient and Orientalism and their relation to the Occident.

According to Said, Orientalism can be understood in at least three ways. The first one, and the most commonly used, is the imaginative description. In this description, the Orient is the ‘exotic beings’ that has a special place in European Western experience. Here the Orient is “…not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies… most recurring images of the Other… the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image… (Said in Walder, 1990: 234).” Here the Orient and the Occident (English, French, Americans, other European colonizers) define each other and find their identity by searching the differences between each other. Therefore Orientalism can be understood as a mere airy European fantasy abour the Orient.

The second way is through the academic point of view, in which the Orient is described as the style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between the Orient and the Occident. Therefore those who write and teach the sociology, the history, the anthropology and other science in the big title of Orient may be called the Orientalists.

The third way is the Orientalism as the style in which the Western dominates, restructure, and have authority over the Orient. Here we have to look at how the British and French hegemonize the India and the Bible lands, and how the US expand her power over the Near East. In this way, the Occident is also the Orientalist. The issue of power, domination, and hegemony is indeed takes a big role in studying ideas, culture, and histories of the Orient.

Over the colonization years, the Orient has been a ‘career’ for Westerns. Under the umbrella of Western hegemony over the Orient, emerged a complex Orient that is suitable for studying in academy, displaying in museum, also illustration in anthropology and other studies.

After giving a description about what and how Orientalism is, Said takes the discourse further in the second part of the essay. In this part, Said elaborates how the discourse influences a White person abroad (particularly to the Far or Near East). Borrowing Kipling’s idea of The White Man, Said alluded the Westerns as The White Man. The White Man abroad will feel superiorly different, and the feeling will be emphasized by the contrast of his skin from the natives (or the Other). This feeling is formed b the authority before which the non-whites and the whites were expected to bend.

The nonwhites will ignore the actual outsiders (the colonies, the poor, the delinquent) among them, because they are busy thinking that they are inferior, that their function in the society is to give example about who were constitutionally unsuited for. They are mere the objects studied by the Occidental white. Taking ‘the Arabs’ as his example, Said says that the natives (or the Oriental natives) have the aura of apartness from the whites.

Jean-Paul Sartre’s Writing, Reading, and The Public; a Discussion on Commited Literary Work

Here is a summary of Sartre's work that I did as a weekly homework. This summary was made in a hurry so I believe that it is not good enough. I am open for any discussion on this topic, so it can broaden our knowledge about literature and commitment.

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In this essay Sartre elaborates the role of a (prose) writer in describing the world and experience of his readers in his writing. In writing a literary work, a writer must have (intentionally or unintentionally) chosen a group of people as his readers. Usually a writer will choose the same group to which he belongs to (entre nous), for example Richard Wright chose to dedicate his writing to the cultivated black slaves of the North (and the white Americans of goodwill). Sartre assumes Wright and other writers will choose the people of their group because they “… have lived through the same events, who have raised or avoided the same questions, have the same taste in their mouth; they have the same complicity, and there are the same corpses among them” (Sartre in Walder, 1990:84). Therefore, people of the same group (period of time and community) usually prefer to, fight against, and understand the same things.

According to Sartre, a writer’s task is to put in words the world and experiences that are felt by and happen to their readers. In Wright’s case, Wright put in words the misery that has to be endured by his fellow black slaves. The literate black slaves that read his books, e.g. Black Boy, understand the things Wright mentioned and omitted in his writings. The readers then will reflect what they read to their very life, and they will see themselves as the subject written in the story. Not only that they see themselves, the black slave readers will see themselves seen by other readers who read the same story.

Wright’s stories are also intended to be read by white people who are against slavery. In this case, Wright’s writing will confirm what they believe and what they consider to be the truth. Black Boy also can be read by an acute negro-phobic. In this case, the negro-phobic will see himself as a ‘bare-naked’ antagonist. He also will realize that he is also seen ‘bare-naked’-ly by other readers. The wanted effect is that he feels guilty to the black slaves and changes his attitude towards them. The other probability is that the book makes him aware of what the blacks think towards him and his group, but he continues his anti-negro attitude whatsoever. However, white readers are the Others in Wright’s case, because his writings are only can be fully understood by those who belong to the same period and community as he did.

Besides presenting the world and the experiences of the real people of the real world in his writing, a committed writer is also aware that his writing can changes things (for example the attitude of an anti-negro). A piece of writing can cause guilty conscious to the whole society by putting in words the acts, ideology, and facts inside the society into a writing for them to read. The writers may say that by writing they are serving the community’s interests, but the conservative governing class may see them as long-lasting antagonists. The conservatives try to preserve the balance, while a piece of writing may bring about the chaos of change. However, writers earn their living from those who buy their writings, and it is only the governing class who can pay such luxury (of what Sartre defines as an unproductive and dangerous job). Sartre says that the writers and the governing elites are always in mutual opposition, but in the same time, they need each other.

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This discussion is actually followed by Adorno's Commitment, but I did not finish reading the essay.