Explaining some ideas extracted from the introduction of his Orientalism, Edward W. Said describes in ‘The Politics of Knowledge’ how the politics of identity, which is resulted from, and is also a basic for, the politics of knowledge has been operating for many decades and has led to such a legitimated colonialism. Here the epistemology of imperialism finds its roles. In this epistemology, according to Said, ‘is the supremely stubborn thesis that everyone is principally and irreducibly a member of some race or category, and that race or category cannot ever be assimilated to or accepted by others—except as itself.’[1]
Said then goes on to argue that the interaction between colonizers and native peoples has, in the colonized world, raised an awareness as well as a will to resist every single attempt of imperialist expansion. So antagonistic is the interaction that many revolts are undertaken by the colonized peoples. Imperialism—which is influenced by Orientalism as well as a practicing of the system of thought by the West to rule and to view the Orient—has forced the colonized peoples to reclaim their identity as new independent nations considerably hoping to be viewed and treated equally the same as are others.
‘… Thus came into being such invented essences as the Oriental or Englishness, as Frenchness, Africanness, or American exceptionalism, as if each of those had a Platonic idea behind it that guaranteed it as pure and unchanging from the beginning to the end of time.’[2] The sentence inevitably leads us to reconsider the general identities of human that have for years rigidly been taken for granted as attaching to every people born in this world. It is indeed true that one cannot choose what he or she would look like at the time of his or her birth. As peoples are, however, not to see some racial options they could take in the very beginning of their lives, it is unfair to treat them in favor of something they are not actually able to reject. A group of peoples are probably in quite the same vision about their own fellows, but they usually tend to make a different on in seeing the others. This is the reality of the West’s unfairness toward the Orient that Said tries to describe. Yet the point seems to make Orientalism an unbalancing view is not how the West differently sees the Orient, but that the West has not thoroughly been looking to the Orient as it is. They do, instead, merely take many simplified generalizations and stereotypes as several dominant keys to recognize the Orient. ‘So impressive have the descriptive and textual successes of Orientalism been that entire periods of the Orient’s cultural, political, and social history are considered mere responses to the West… The West is the spectator, the judge and jury, of every facet of Oriental behavior.’[3]
Said really wants to assert that the politics of knowledge, as well as the politics of identity, prevails in some disciplines related to Orientalism, including literary field. Literature, and its criticisms, Said argues, is a human intellectual work that should articulate worldly since it takes place in, and talks about, the world. He also recommends that it would be better if a critic is to find out some real historical phenomena in engaged works about the Orient by seeing them as having a representation of political struggle deeply rooted in culture of the oppressed peoples, and by considering such things as domination, expansion, resistance, and racial prejudice. Said, however, knows that ‘it is risky to move from the realm of interpretation to the realm of politics,’ but for him it seems true that ‘the relationship between them is a real one…’[4]
Let’s get back to the politics of identity. We may obviously find that a great bulk of imperial expansions by the West upon the Orient is based on the assertion of identity. The Westerners, who are still perpetually claiming themselves as the most highly civilized peoples on earth, feel a necessity to conquer, to govern, and ‘to civilize’ the Orientals that inhabits the so-called Third World—an imaginary place arranged by the Occident as to assume such an exotic hemisphere in which the inferior human beings dwell. Those Westerners have, in all of this, been establishing all at once their superiority over the Orientals.
I should not, however, let anyone forgets a crucial fact that polarization between the West and the Orient invariably implies a contradiction between the white and the non-white. Many fragments in sequences of history open our eyes to highlight a perpetual tendency that the white frequently have reasons to rule and to attack the non-white, ‘just because a definition that “it” is not quite as human as “we” are.’[5]
Here I recall to a fragment in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, the dialogue between Crooks and Lennie:
Crooks said sharply, ‘you got no right to come in my room. This here’s my room. Nobody got any right in here but me.’
Lennie gulped and his smile grew more fawning. ‘I ain’t doing nothing,’ he said. ‘Just come to look at my puppy. And I seen your light,’ he explained.
‘Well, I got a right to have a light. You go on get outta my room. I ain’t wanted in the bunk house, and you ain’t wanted in my room.’
‘Why ain’t you wanted?’ Lennie asked.
‘Cause I’m black. They play cards in there, but I can’t play because I’m black. They say I stink. Well, I tell you, you all of you stink to me.’[6]
Crooks realizes by himself the fact that he would not somehow be accepted by white peoples. He has precisely found out that he get used to such a situation of the white’ refusal to let him joining in playing cards due to his destiny as a genuinely black people. Something makes everything get worse and worse is that the man who presumably pays attention to involve in somewhat focused conversation by asking the rejectedness of Crooks is Lennie, a character represented as dumb, ridiculous man, whose words do not even deserve a single thoughtful consideration from his closest fellow, George.
The non-white world is always depicted as having no sufficient power and capability to perform its own play so much so that it ought to surrender, to learn zealously, and to play scenarios the white-world provides for. So deeply-rooted have the stereotypes and generalizations been made by the white over the non-white that ‘Crooks had retired into the terrible protective dignity of Negro.’[7] Here lurks in my mind an assumption that the nonwhite peoples still sometimes let themselves trapped and subjected to the white arrangement of generalizations and distinctions while they are not supposed to be. No longer does a nonwhite people feel astonished of his or her inferior status that ‘… this is just a nigger talkin’, an’ a busted-back nigger. So it don’t mean nothing…’[8]
We are, at this point, inevitably insisted to reconsider the criticism that many critics have been applying to various literary works, because, Said argues, ‘whatever else they are, works of literature are not merely texts. They are in fact differently constituted and have different values, they aim to do different things, exist in different genres, and so on.’[9] Said prominently states that literature is a place for ideological and political struggle. As in the fragment I quoted above, we can see how vigorous Steinbeck was to highlight ironies of human misconceptions and failures in grasping their life clearly, and that ‘… he was called “Communist” and “left-wing visionary” by men angered by his tenderness for the victims of change and his broad hint of social revolution…’[10] This may well be a supporting evidence for such a statement that literature and its criticism is a space for any struggle or even, frankly speaking, rebellion.
The non-white, the Orient, the
Said does emphasize that literature and criticism must be, and need to be comprehended, worldly. But something I want to point out here is the idea of, as I have previously explained, the politics of identity. As we can see today, such a politics has led to nationalism. Peoples everywhere are driven to reconsider their identities. Yet aren’t we invited to find out why thousands of ethnics, which are actually different with each other, agree to unite in one nationalistic perception as a whole? It is indeed not their will to do so, but the imperialist pressures make them do. Aren’t we able to see that nationalism is merely an imagined ideal for it is mean nothing more than just a reconsideration of an identity based on straight encounter with the other?
Let’s see the longstanding Palestinian-Israeli conflict as a real example. We can avoid noting an assumption that the battle is an encounter to establish their existence, one against the other. Both groups of peoples have to fight to exist in historical life, for they are human being that, according to Sartre, ‘is the being who hurls himself toward a future and who is conscious of imagining himself as being in the future.’[11] But something I find significant here is, given the reality that Israeli is supposedly affiliated to the West and Palestinian to the Orient, the perpetual domination of the West over the Orient so far as it is evident that the Westerners are still ruling over the world of images operated by such means as mass media, political engagement, and cultural movement.
I pay attention to the word ‘terrorist.’ This word is created by the West to label an inherent nature of Arabs and even of Muslims. An action would simply be called terrorism if it was only done by the Arabs or Muslims. But how about the massacres by Israeli over thousands of Palestinian women and children? What name would we use to call such a wicked crime? Is this not enough to lead us to find an evidence of the West’s highly ability to rule the world of images, to occupy the popular mind? One of results of this ability is the outstanding image about the Arabs, that they ‘are thought of as camel riding, terroristic, hook-nosed, venal lechers whose undeserved wealth is an affront to real civilization.’[12]
I give you another case to comprehend this thing better. As the American government initiates the Non-Proliferation Treaty of Nuclear Weapon by recommending every country not to build a nuclear installation, we can see a paradoxical attitude of Americans: they develop nuclear system of their own. Isn’t all of this just a schizophrenic fear that the
Intensely, powerfully, and vigorously, the West rules over its counterparts and give them various generalizations, stereotypes, and particular identities through any media in such a way that those inferior labels attached to the Orient are gradually regarded as inherent, unchangeable nature of the Orient. We can hence here notice the significance of what Said said that ‘various Others… were being represented unfairly, their reality distorted, their truth either denied or twisted with malice…’[13] I can imagine that if a man sees me, he will grasp me as he assume me to be, and not as I am, nor as I want to be. In this context, he creates his own image of myself, and ‘I am creating a certain image of man of my own choosing.’[14] What I try to illustrate here is a simplest instance of how an identity always politically collides with another. And the somewhat similar situation has been happening to the West ‘s view of the Orient.
It is therefore no wonder that Said mystifies and celebrates historical values contained in literary work and criticism, for they are the actual human works that should not exclude a particular group of peoples. And such works as literature or art could also serve as ‘strategies for selecting enemies and allies, for socializing losses, for warding off evil eye, for purification…’[15] One thing I feel important to underline is Said’s words that ‘to say that we are against theory, or beyond literature, is to be blind and trivial.’[16] So there must be a redirection in literary criticism because, according to Said, ‘it does not finally matter who wrote what, but rather how a work is written and how it is read.’[17] This is I think the very urgent thing I can capture from what Said tries to describe in his essay.
While the world is getting globalized more and more, we are, as peoples who are imaginedly believed to inhabit such an imaginary geographical area called the Orient, hardly able to refuse the overflood of the Western that always creeps up everywhere. The problem is no longer about the distorted Western conception of us the Oriental, but how we articulate our own voice in such a way that we can speak and think at least about, and for, ourselves, and that to reconsider a particular identity does not have to mean eliminating the others. A great deal of wars took place throughout the world should be the lessons teach us how awful the compelling reclamation of identity was when peoples cannot detach themselves out of a narrow-stricted thought that pushed them not to extend, nor to admit the others, humanities. For ‘at times of war we were the losers, there’s no victory.’[18] As to the reconsideration of identity, I just eventually want to reassert my words in the beginning of this short essay, that it is unfair to treat peoples in favor of something they are not actually able to reject.
[1] Edward W. Said, ‘The Politics of Knowledge,’ in Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer (ed.), Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies (New York: Longman, 1994), p. 147.
[3] Edward W. Said, ‘Crisis (in Orientalism),’ in David Lodge (ed.), Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader (New York: Longman, 1988), p. 308.
[10] ‘John Steinbeck,’ in Walter Blair, Theodore Hornberger, and Randall Stewart (eds.), The Literature of the
[11] Jean Paul Sartre, ‘Existentialism,’ in Arthur M. Eastman (gen. ed.), The Norton Reader: An Anthology of Expository Prose (New York: WW Norton & Company, 1965), p. 659.
[13] Said, ‘The Politics…,’ p. 146.
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