Said’s orientalism is essentialist and replicates the sweeping assumptions that make orientalism possible in the first place

Now that “orientalism” has become an academic buzzword, it may be useful to recall its former meanings. From the mid-eighteenth to the late-twentieth century, the term was applied to the study of the languages, literatures, and cultures of the Orient. In his 1978 book Orientalism, Edward Said acknowledges this ordinary (but by then obsolete) meaning and adds two others: “a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident’ ” and “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.”2 It is with the third sort of orientalism that Said chiefly is concerned. “Orientalism” in this sense is a discourse about the Orient as the “other” of Europe, which confirms Europe’s dominant position. Said studies the works of scholars who instantiate this discourse but he is less concerned with particular individuals than with the body of European discursive practices in regard to “the Orient” that generate a self affirming account of what it is (essentially inferior to Europe, and so on).3 One of his more controversial contentions is that all European orientalists of the colonial period were consciously or unconsciously complicit in the aims of European colonialism.4 Said’s theory has been criticized by scholars who study oriental cultures—now referred to as Indologists, Sinologists, Asian Studies specialists, and so forth— on several counts. Many object to his indiscriminate lumping together of different types of orientalism. Denis Vidal, for instance, insists that colonial orientalism of the nineteenth century and the sort of orientalism highlighted by Said are “two entirely different things.” The orientalism of the nineteenth century itself had two sides, one scholastic, the other romantic, and “Said’s definitions cannot account for” this distinction.5 Thomas Trautmann reminds us that British champions of Indian languages and culture (called “Orientalists”) were opposed by government proponents of English education (called “Anglicists”), and notes that “the Saidian expansion of Orientalism, applied in this context, tends to sow confusion where there was once clarity.”6 David Ludden distinguishes “colonial knowledge,” which generated authoritative facts about colonized people, from other forms of orientalism, some of which were explicitly anticolonial.7 Rosane Rocher spells out the consequences of these conflations: “Said’s sweeping and passionate indictment of orientalist scholarship as part and parcel of an imperialist, subjugating enterprise does to orientalist scholarship what he accuses orientalist scholarship of having done to the countries east of Europe; it creates a single discourse, undifferentiated in space and time and across political, social and intellectual identities.”8 The irony is that the Saidian analysis of orientalist discourse is itself an orientalist discourse—one that “sometimes appears to mimic the essentializing discourse it attacks,” as James Clifford puts it.9 This essentializing of orientalist scholarship might be excused if it resulted in a transformed view of oriental and occidental societies. But to Said the Occident is always the dominant partner, determining the terms of the oriental response. As a result the very orientals who are meant to be the beneficiaries of the Saidian analysis are again denied agency and voice.10