Final Assignment

Belhaj Nizar BA/IBE

Orientalism:
-Orientalism has been used as a term describing the study of Asian and East societies and
an old-fashioned name for a set of academic fields dedicated to what had been widely
known as "Oriental studies". In recent years the subject has often been turned into the
newer terms of Middle Eastern studies and Asian studies. Traditional Oriental studies in
Europe are today generally focused on the discipline of Islamic studies, while the study of
China, especially traditional China, is often called Sinology. The study of East Asia in
general, especially in the United States, is often called East Asian studies.

Modern Orientalism and Edward Said:

-In 1979, Orientalism had become a hotly debated notion among scholars in
several academic fields, no longer simply taken. And while it remained for
some a good word to name a good thing, for many others "Orientalism" was
suddenly a window into the horrors and immoralities of Western colonialism. It
was an ideology that had promoted Western domination by imagining and
constructing "Orientals" as being essentially inferior.

-The first criticism on “Orientalism” and the “Orientalists” was during the years
of decolonization in the early 1960s, and was mounted by ethnic Asians
educated and living the West. As a result, orientalism as a term was
transformed from a fully accepted name of a subject in the humanities to one
of the most charged and contested words in modern scholarship making it
almost impossible to utilize expressions like “the Orient” and “Orientals”
without using quotation marks.

-The criticism on Orientalism by the Palestinian-American historian Edward

Said at Columbia University in New York was the most influential and the most
complete. Said managed a frontal attack on Orientalism as a cumulative and
discourse in his pioneering work Orientalism. Said’s definition to “Orientalism”
is that it argues that colonialism was not only a system of political rule, but
also an all-around worldview that simply believed the West is superior to the
East. The Orient is for Said the West´s eternal other, and Orientalism is a
discourse that has survived and been able to reproduce itself for centuries,
resulting in catastrophic consequences for the victims, the Asians themselves.

-This discourse says that the West stands for rationality and modernity, while
the Orient stands for religiousness and tradition, and following the logic of
developmental thinking, the West possessed the right to conquer, suppress
and rule over the East. Orientalism is a way of thinking about non-western
people as strange, servile, exotic, dark, mysterious, erotic and dangerous, and
has helped the West to define itself through this contrasting image. It is
important to remember that the relationship between the West and Asia has
never been equal, as the West conquered, colonized, and exploited the people
of Asia.

- To rationalize the conquest, it defined Asia and the Asians as despotic or

stagnant and in need of Christianizing, civilizing or control. Demands for
democratization among Asian countries came only after the West had
retreated, thereby giving credence to counterarguments about Western
opportunism in international analysis.

- Said also tried to prove that academic world was closely connected to the
political power system by showing that academics collaborated in the West’s
domination of the East. After Said, numerous studies have been published on
the different orientalisms of the West that various countries and cultures of
Asia have suffered. Among many orientalists, Said´s book provoked angry and
sometimes even hateful responses, while others declared themselves ready for
a fundamental change of attitude towards Eastern world.

-Since 1978, things have never been the same, scholars in a wide range of
fields and working in nearly every corner of the world have elaborated on
Said's original thesis that classical Orientalism was in fact an ideology of
domination. Over those decades, scholars have discovered literally hundreds
of "Orientalisms". And after reading said “Orientalism” book, they have found
that the whole notion of Orientalism is much more complicated than it seems.

Hegemony:
-The word “hegemony” was first mentioned in Greece. It derives from the word
“hegeisthai” which means “to lead”. The first hegemon which spread its
influence all over the globe was the British Empire during the beginning of the
19th Century. The hegemony, or dominance, of Britain during this period
rooted not only from its large military power on the seas, but also from its
financial and ideological power in both its Empire and elsewhere. Around 1945
the so-called American hegemony took place.

--The definition of hegemony and an empire has been hotly debated over the
past few decades. Some believe hegemony is a tactic to avoid the word empire
and the negative connotations that are associated with it. Others believe that a
hegemony is a more technical, well thought out form of an empire. Some
believe it is a lesser form of imperialism. Although one thing that is not
disputed is the fact that hegemony very well is a form of dominance over a
smaller, weaker nation, and no matter what one may call it, or how it may be
approached, dominance will continue to flourish through the ages. Referring to
the organization of the international system after the Second World War.

Culture Hegemony according to Antonio Gramsci:

-When talking about hegemony, mentioning the name Antonio Gramsci is
inevitable. Gramsci who had a significant influence on the definition of the term
as we know it today.

-Cultural hegemony developed by Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci refers

to rules maintained through ideological or cultural means. It is usually
achieved by the spread of ideologies, beliefs, assumptions, and values through
social institutions (schools, churches, courts, and the media..), which allow
those in power to strongly influence the values, norms, ideas, expectations,
worldview, and behavior of the rest of society.

- Gramsci developed the concept of cultural hegemony in an effort to explain

why the worker-led revolution that Marx predicted in the previous century had
not come to pass. Central to Marx’s theory of capitalism was the belief that the
destruction of this economic system was built into the system itself since
capitalism is premised on the exploitation of the working class by the ruling
class. Marx reasoned that workers could only take so much economic
exploitation before they would rise up and overthrow the ruling class. However,
this revolution did not happen on a mass scale.

--Cultural hegemony is most strongly manifested when those ruled by the

dominant group come to believe that the economic and social conditions of
their society are natural and inevitable, rather than created by people with
vested interest in particular social, economic, and political orders.

-Gramsci accepted the analysis of capitalism put forward by Marx and

accepted that the struggle between the ruling class and the subordinate
working class was the driving force that moved society forward. Gramsci did
not agree with the notion put forward by Marx that the ruling class stayed in
power solely because they had economic power. He thus introduced his own
concept using ideology. Ideology is the shared ideas or beliefs which serve to
justify the interests of dominant groups. Gramsci felt that ideological power
kept the ruling class in power because it allowed them to brainwash and
manipulate the rest of society.

- Gramsci realized that there was more to the dominance of capitalism than the
class structure and its exploitation of workers. Marx had recognized the
important role that ideology played in reproducing the economic system and
the social structure that supported it, but Gramsci believed that Marx had not
given enough credit to the power of ideology. In his essay “The Intellectuals”,
he described the power of ideology to reproduce the social structure through
institutions such as religion and education. He argued that society's
intellectuals, often viewed as detached observers of social life, are actually
embedded in a privileged social class and enjoy great prestige. As such, they
function as the “deputies” of the ruling class, teaching and encouraging
people to follow the norms and rules established by the ruling class. Gramsci
elaborated on the role the education system plays in the process of achieving
rule by consent, or cultural hegemony, in his essay “On Education”.

-According to Gramsci, hegemony never disappears but is constantly changed.

He describes two forms of social control. The first type is coercive control
which is achieved through the use of direct force or threat of force.The second
type is consensual control which arises when individuals voluntarily adopt the
worldview of the dominant group. For exemple, within civil society, the
dominant group exercises hegemony which is intellectual domination over the
subordinate group or consensual control, whereas in political society,
domination is exercised through state or juridical government or coercive
control.

-Gramsci felt that in order to have hegemony, ideologies have to be instilled by

certain people or leaders. Gramsci identified intellectuals as leaders in society.
He identified two types of intellectuals. The first is traditional intellectuals who
are people that regard themselves as independent of the dominant social
group and are regarded as such by the majority of the population. The second
type is the organic intellectual. This is the group that grows organically with
the ruling class, and is their thinking and organizing element. They were
produced by the educational system to perform a function for the dominant
social group in society. It is through this group that the ruling class maintains
its hegemony over the rest of society.

-To sum up, cultural hegemony, or our tacit agreement with the way that things
are, is a result of socialization, our experiences with social institutions, and our
exposure to cultural narratives and imagery, all of which reflect the beliefs and
values of the ruling class.

the influence of Antonio Gramsci on Edward Said:

-Edward Said’s Orientalism is one of the founding texts of postcolonial studies.
In its reception the book’s conceptualization and analysis of the operations of
power have predominantly been seen as Gramscian.

In fact, a more careful analysis of Orientalism’s conceptualization of power

from a Gramscian perspective might reveal different dimensions of power.
Comparing Gramsci’s writings on hegemony and its incorporation and
elaboration in Orientalism, we notice that the Gramscian heritage is translated
into Said’s critical practice and supplemented by the theories of Foucault.
Therefore, reading Orientalism in a Gramscian light offers a better
understanding of Said’s conceptualization of power.

- Said emphasized the relationship between power and knowledge in scholarly

and well liked conceiving, in specific considering European views of the
Islamic Arab world. Said contended that Orient and Occident worked as
oppositional terms.

The work of Antonio Gramsci, was furthermore important in shaping Edward

Said's investigation in this area. In specific, Said can be seen to have been
influenced by Gramsci's idea of hegemony in understanding the pervasiveness
of Orientalist constructs and representations in Western scholarship and
reporting, and their relative to the exercise of power over the "Orient".

-Said relies on Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, to explain power-

differentials between the East and the West. Orientalism gains power through
the superiority of the hegemonic culture. The subjugation of the East is
achieved not only by direct coercion but also by partial representation through
a collection of texts ranging from travel writings, novels, translations, religious
tracts and historical documents to laws and codes whose coherent density is
able to claim the power to represent the East and, to a certain extent, becomes
sufficient to speak on behalf of the East without the East speaking for itself.

- For Gramsci the working class was “economist” if it spoke only for itself. He
urged Italy’s Socialist Party and later its Communist Party to take up the
“Southern Question” that is, the plight of the peasantry, particularly in the less-
industrialized southern part of Italy. But Gramsci was not content with just a
worker-peasant alliance. He called for the working-class parties to provide
“moral leadership” for all “subalterns,” who he defined as anyone in a
subordinate position in capitalist society.

Similarly, in his book Orientalism Said stakes out a viewpoint of moral

leadership in his underlying theme of challenging the way Western colonialism
and its literature dehumanized and denied agency to colonized peoples. Said’s
critique of the West’s conception of the Orient is ultimately based on a radical
understanding and rejection of the notion of superior cultures, placing the
“Orientalist” framework firmly in the context of colonialism and imperialism.

- Gramsci’s concept of ‘hegemony’ is rooted in his distinction between coercion

and consent as alternative mechanisms of social power. Coercion refers to the
states capacity to use violence and force over individuals in society who refuse
to comply with the ideologies of the dominant class. Whereas consent involves
hegemonic power, that “works to convince individuals and social classes to
subscribe to the social values and norms of an inherently exploitative system”.

Under the same theory, colonization of Orient depends on both the use of
physical force and coercion and the consent of the subjected people through
Orientalism. Put in Said’s words, “cultural domination is maintained, as much
as by Oriental consent as by direct and crude economic pressure.”