18th March, 25th March, 1st April 2008

Convenor: AbdoolKarim Vakil (Lecturer in Contemporary Portuguese History, King's College London)

Thirty years after first publication Edward W. Said’s Orientalism (1978) is a book more wielded than read.  The particular scholarly merits and demerits of the book apart, its publication irreversibly reshaped the fields of postcolonial academic and wider public debates in ways which are still with us.  “Orientalism”, in particular, acquired meanings and a charge which allows it work as shorthand for critiques which are central to critical analysis and denunciations of Islamophobia in popular, learned and policy oriented discourse. In light of the recent spate of critical re-examinations and close readings of Orientalism, hostile and sympathetic, and the re-assessments of the late Edward Said’s career and stance as a Palestinian public intellectual, what of Orientalism is dead and what still speaks to us, ivory tower readers in the age of the War on Terror? 

In these meetings we will examine some of these questions by means of an engagement with the text and its afterlife. 

Set text: Edward W. Said, Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2003)

Session 1: Introducing and Revisiting Orientalism (18th March)
Required reading:

• 'Introduction' (1978);
• 'Afterword' (1995);
• 'Preface' (2003);
• Edward Said, Orientalism Reconsidered, Cultural Critique, No. 1. (Autumn, 1985), pp. 89-107: JStor Link

Session 2: The Making of Orientalism (25th March)
Set reading:

From Chapter 1 (The Scope of Orientalism)

• Section 1. Knowing the Oriental and;
  
• Section 2. Imaginative Geography and its Representations: Orientalizing the Oriental 

Session 3: Orientalism at Work and War (1st April)
Set reading:

From Chapter 2 (Orientalism Structures and Restructures)

• Section 1. Redrawn  frontiers, redefined issues, secularised religion, (esp. para. ‘My thesis’, p.122);
  

 From Chapter 3 (Orientalism Now)

• Section 1. Latent and Manifest Orientalism

Further reading

Those wanting to situate Said’s intervention in the retrospective mapping of an emerging internal and external critique and contestation of the work of Orientalists and Orientalism, will find an excellent selection in the accessible anthology  edited by A. L Macfie, Orientalism: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U.P., 2000), including, in particular, Said’s own ‘Shattered Myths’ (1975) and ‘Arabs, Islam and the Dogmas of the West’ (NYRB 1976) which work up towards the book itself. 

Those wishing to situate the advent of Orientalism in the history and discourse of postcolonialism (and are not put off by its monumental length) will find Robert J.C. Young’s Postcolonialism: An historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001) particularly interesting and readable; 

for those wishing to follow their reading up with secondary materials, the most  
comprehensive (if a little irritating), critical but sympathetic reading of the text and survey of the polemics over Orientalism is: Daniel Martin Varisco, Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007;

for a scholarly, rigorous but pedantic and hostile orientalist critique of Orientalism’s errors of fact see Robert Irwin’s For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies (London: Allen Lane, 2006);

for an exemplary hostile islamophobic rant dressed up as scholarly critique see (or preferably avoid) Ibn Warraq’s Defending the West: A critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2007);

for those interested in Said’s application of the critique to representations of Islam and Muslims in contemporary discourse, or more informal discussions of its thesis and applications, see Edward Said, Covering Islam: How the media and the experts determine how we see the rest of the world (London: RKP, 1981); the essays, book reviews and interviews collected in Reflections on Exile and Other Critical and Cultural Essays (London: Granta, 2000) and Power, Politics and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said, ed. by Gauri Viswanathan (London: Bloomsbury, 2004); Said’s collected writings on Palestine and the Palestinian question, especially The Question of Palestine (1979, 2nd ed. 1992) and The Politics of Dispossession (1994) and the co-edited volume Blaming the Victims (1988).  Beyond the specific focus on Muslims and Islam, reading Orientalism should be followed up by reading his Culture and Imperialism (1993) and Freud and the Non-European (2003);

for a demanding but highly rewarding attempt to move not merely beyond the orientalism criticised by Said but also the aporias of both Said’s critique of orientalist representations of “Islam” and anti-orientalist readings of “Islams”, see S. Sayyid, ‘Thinking Islamism, (re-)thinking Islam’, chapter 2 of A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism, London: Zed Books, 1997; 2nd ed., 2003. 

For further bibliography: The Edward Said Archive: http://www.edwardsaid.org/?q=node/1 

For resources on two key thinkers fundamental to Said’s Orientalism, Michel Foucault (discourse) and Antonio Gramsci (hegemony), see, respectively:

http://www.foucault.qut.edu.au/

http://soc.qc.cuny.edu/gramsci/