Orientalism Flashcards
Kant (1875)
The Enlightenment is the growing trust in science and progress during the 17/18th century in Western Europe. This was a turn against religion as a guiding principle for everyday life.
Kant’s concept of ‘human reason’ became crucial- the belief in the capacity of human reason to overcome constraints, self-imposed prejudices and immaturity. Essentially this was the capacity of reason to emancipate humanity from a state of nature.
“Now man actually finds in himself a power which distinguishes him from all other things - and even from himself so far as he is affected by objects. This power is reason”.
Horkheimer and Adorno (1944)
Our estrangement from nature is intrinsically tied to the intellectual project of the Enlightenment. “The Enlightenment has always been aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing sovereignty”.
Knowledge, which is power, knows no obstacles; mythology is the inverse of Enlightenment (it is the domination of nature over man). What this gives us is simply another form of myth making- science and truth are simply myths formulated through mathematics (through these we render the world quantifiable). “That which does not reduce to numbers […] becomes illusion”
Nature is no longer a power of its own- it is disenchanted; immanently manageable; nature becomes the chaotic matter of mere classification.
“What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order to wholly dominate it and other men. That is the only aim”.
Adam Smith
The idea of ‘development’ can be traced in particular to the Scottish Enlightenment. Adam Smith was a key scholar in this process (free markets and neoliberalism)
The thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment asserted the fundamental importance of human reason combined with a rejection of any authority which could not be justified by reason. They held to an optimistic belief in the ability of man to effect changes for the better in society and nature, guided only by reason.
Escobar (1995)
There was an idea that logic could progress societies from ‘backwards’ to ‘civilization’. This was represented as an emancipatory process- freeing people from the power of the clergy and monarchy (elites of society)
However, this process was NOT necessarily emancipators. A lot of the ideas of development were based upon the mastering of nature and changing balances of power. It was fundamentally based upon a system in which the educated and civilized were trusted to govern (Europeans).
These ideas fundamentally fuelled colonialism- the educated had a duty to deliver Enlightenment to backwards societies. This introduced the dynamic of master/slave.
As a result, many critics of development studies see post-1945 development as “the last and failed attempt to complete the Enlightenment in Asia, Africa and Latin America”
Driver and Yeoh (2000)
One imaginative geography is the notion of ‘The Tropics’
This became part of an imaginative geography that shaped the production and consumption of knowledge in the 21st century. This line of geographic enquiry emerged after WW2
The problem with this was that most of the research produced was pro-colonialism.
Harraway (1991)
“Binaries have all been systematic to the logics of domination on women, people of colour, nature, workers and animals- in short, domination of all constituted as others, whose task is to mirror the self”
Said (1978)
Said (1978) seeks to understand to what extent does the discourse of orientalism match up with the actual ‘Orient’?
Orientalism has three different layers:
1) A field of academic research
This is the formal study of the orient that aims to consolidate certain ways of seeing and thinking about the orient. This began in the 18th century; “dealing with [the Orient] by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, teaching it, settling it and ruling over it”
2) A style of thought
These are everyday imaginative geographies which inspire the fact that there is a natural distinction between the Orient and the Occident. “So authoritative a position did Orientalism have that I believe no one writing, thinking, or acting on the Orient could do so without taking account of the limitations on thought and action imposed by the Orientalism”
3) A western style of domination
The two points above are mobilised to legitimise certain forms of control over the Orient- colonialism, for example.
Said (1978) claims that without examining Orientalism, “one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period…”
Everything people KNEW about the Orient was fundamentally a discourse. BUT, thus has very little basis in what people were in themselves. Knowing an entire region (almost half the world) through a singular lens.
Embedded within orientalism is the process of ‘othering’. Said (1978) states that “European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self.”
This started a set of binary representations between the West and the Orient. These discourses said NOTHING about the actual Orient, but rather focused on saying something about Europe. This was done by contrasting the two regions to learn about ourselves- primitive/civilised.
There are some critiques to this process…
a) If the discourse was so omnipotent and omnipotent is there any room for the ‘other’s’ voice or representation?
b) Vaughan (1994) argues that the colonial subject is reduced to having no independent existence outside of the Orientalist literature
c) At a theoretical level, Said appears to have placed himself in the position of denying the possibility of any alternative description of the Orient.
McClintock (1995)
Non-Western landscapes were represented as wild, exotic, barbaric and savage.
For example, Africa was frequently imagined as the dark continent (this still exists today).
In many of these discourses, places were ‘emptied’ (no mention of the people living in these places).
Many of these other places were associated with femininity- in opposition to masculine exploration and domination of place.
Africa was represented as a sexual place- ‘porno tropics’.
Abrahamsen (2001)
“Before development, there is nothing but deficiencies. Underdeveloped areas have no history of their own, hardly any past worth recalling, and certainly none that’s worth retaining. Everything before development can be abandoned, and third world countries emerge as empty vessels waiting to be filled with the development from the first world”
There is a sense of amnesia around development discourses- forgetting the history of places that require development. These places were empty voids waiting to be filled with Western progress.
Power (2003)
The vision of global development is still based around the idea of linear progression. Predominantly based upon the GDP (income) of a nation. But this indicator is often generalized- the ‘gaps’ between global incomes are rarely questioned or problematized. Such representations of poverty may therefore be responsible for reproducing and widening these gaps.
Representations of the ‘third world’ and the ‘West’ have certain moral, cultural and socio-political attributes. These representations have an impact on the development policies that emerge and the spatial scales at which they do. This also determines the kinds of resistance and contestation such policies face. The ways in which we understand the ‘third world’ is largely dependent upon the information we are exposed to. These individual perceptions are not necessarily false, but they are partial.
Our knowledge of the world is constructed via experience, learning, memory and imagination. Western ideologies were based partly on an imagination of the world- one which legitimized the power of the West to dominate others. By representing the ‘other’ as primitive or backwards, Western societies emerged as developed and rational places. The notion of the ‘tropics’ was invented to label the other.
“What began to emerge was a new spatialized domain of intellectual enquiry and imagined constructions of otherness around which crystallized a distinctly ‘modern’ set of truths, assumptions and hierarchies”.
Andreasson (2005)
Contemporary Africa is often depicted as the failure of development. There are often allusions to ‘natural weakness’ and incapability in explaining this apparent lack of development.
Reductive repetition reduces the diversity of African historical experiences into a set of core deficiencies- for which externally generated solutions must be found.
Despite great diversity in the African continent in terms of social and political contexts, the general conclusion made is that development has gone very wrong. Oversimplifying and distorting the origin of poverty in regions like Africa takes the spotlight off the West for inducing poverty.
Justifications for colonial rule were based upon ‘scientific’ racial hierarchies; since indigenous people could not govern themselves, the tools for social organisation and government must be imposed by colonial masters.
Even after the process of decolonization began, access to resources and opportunity for entrepreneurship were key focuses of the Western world. For example, the US is interested in acquiring favorable long-term agreements on Africa’s expanding oil and mineral export.
Adams (2003)
Those who have written about colonialism have not all been recognized or left a permanent mark in the discourse.
There is a distinct lack of records from women or subjective point of views. The discourse is dominated by white males, imposing their ‘colonial gaze’ upon their subjects.
Since the Enlightenment period, thought has been characterized by a radical uncoupling of society and nature. Reason has allowed humans to transcend nature, and therefore remake it. Therefore, the acquisition of colonies was, to an extent, enabled by the belief that restructuring nature and re-ordering it allows to serve human need for logic and reason.
Craggs and Neate (2017)
The period in the aftermath of WW2 was marked by a significant international mobility. During this time 1.5 million people came to Britain from the ‘new Commonwealth’ and at least 25,000 colonial administrators and their families returned to the UK.
The second career of these returnees has largely been ignored in research, but it provides a useful lens through which we can understand how the colonisers/colonised binary does not exist: both inform one another.
Decolonization has profound effects on the disciplines of planning, sociology, architecture and geography. It has fundamentally reshaped the fields in which individual experts could work, and the broader disciplinary knowledges that could be deployed.
Mawdsley (2008)
This paper uses critical geopolitics to examine how British newspapers have represented the growing relations between African countries and China.
The discursive patterns they employ act to systematically endorse images of:
a) African weakness
b) Western trusteeship
c) Chinese ruthlessness
