Final DH Project

Orientalism is viewed as the interpretation of the Eastern world, be it in art history, literature, or cultural studies; such an interpretation has been set in place by artists and scholars from the West. This view tends to emphasize, exaggerate or even distort the image of Arabs and Arab culture, as it is construed by Western critics. Although it began ages ago, Orientalist views still delineate a lot of contemporary stances on the Middle East and Arab world, whether in plain sight, or emergent propensities that have been repressed.  

As a result of this, our team has decided to look into Orientalism as a work of intellectual history; we are curious to know why these views still hold true today, to a certain extent, and why they still affect the way the West (and the rest of the world), sees the East. In order to do so, we decided to analyze multiple relations regarding orientalist authors because we wanted to understand the meaning behind this topic and see how it affects us now and how it will affect us later.

At the start of our project, our team met with Dr. Jarkas online to get an idea of how we should organize and layout this project. We created a copy of the master spreadsheet that we  used to analyze and interpret data; it is organized in a sense to include the author’s names, nationality, title of work, text category and date of publication. We used Palladio, since it is a great platform for this project and is typically used as a visual organizer. It allowed us to create different maps for different relationships, necessary for our data collection. It required the use of the edited excel master spreadsheet to assemble all the information prior to our presentation. Palladio helped us delve into the complex relationships between the information inserted in the different categories.  It is important to keep in mind that our analysis from the networks are limited to the data we accessed from the master spreadsheet and we should not generalize on behalf of other uncollected data analysis. 

Next, we decided to list a few research questions in order to pinpoint which aspects we will focus on when analyzing the data from the spreadsheets on palladio. This step was vital to our project because it formed a timeline for us highlighting the different categories we will analyze using the bivariate analysis form. Since the data collected from previous years in the master spreadsheet were not complete, we had to remove a few columns in order for our analysis to be accurate. Therefore, our questions are limited, and we can not gain any analysis on geo-locations and a few others. The first research question we picked was a general and broad one, What major findings do we get when mapping the Orientalists. We chose this research question in order to pick up an analysis from our first instinct when we open up the map on palladio. 

Then, we jotted down all the different and not necessarily correlated analysis we picked up on without deeply looking into the different categories and comparing them to one another. After completing this step, we decided to focus on the four columns in the spreadsheet that had the possibility of common cells. The four columns were authors nationality, text category, authors category, and date of publication. Making this important decision helped us move a step closer in our project and led us to coming up with research questions that best suited the type of data we were dealing with. The research questions we chose were: 

1. What major findings do we get when mapping the Orientalists?
2. Is there a relation between the author’s nationality and text category?
3. Which dates of publication are most dominant with each text category?
4. Which text category emerges as the most representative in this group?
5. Is there an obvious connection between the author’s nationality and category?
6. What is the link found between the author’s category and text category?
7. Is there a relation between the author’s nationality and date of publication? 
8. Is there a correlation between author’s nationality, text category, and author’s category? 

After choosing our research questions, each team member researched different articles written about Orientalism. We each chose the ones that we found most interesting. The three diverse articles we chose were: “Orientalism: Past and Present” by Tobias Hübinette, “Orientalism: It’s Origins and Politics” by Nancy Demerdash, and “Orientalism: Then and Now” by Adam Shatz. Reading these articles enabled us to educate ourselves more about what Orientalism was really all about, and more importantly how it started and what role it plays in today’s world. Although not all the information we gained was relevant to the data we analyzed from the master spreadsheet, we still picked up on a few vital points that helped in our analysis and better understood the meaning behind our analysis. We have incorporated our articles in the analysis section where we saw fit to, and we have added our own summary of the three articles in the appendix section. 

The analysis section of our project was the most time-consuming yet the most interesting part. We were able to learn about Orientalists authors dating back to the 18th century, a century we knew barely anything about, and saw what genres they used to write most about. Every century gave us different results, and every nationality gave us different results, this shows us that Orientalism is truly diverse in nature. 

Analysis:

1. Relation between the author’s nationality and the text category:

• The most dominant orientalist author nationality covered in the data is British. These authors mostly focused on writing fictional work, translation, and travel. They barely wrote about history, religion or the military. 

• American orientalists mainly wrote fictional writings. However, they barely focused on writing about children literature, travel, or religion.

• 3 different French orientalist authors are only available in our data. Two out three of these authors focused on writing about fiction while the other author wrote about travel.

• German orientalists mainly focused on writing fiction. Only a few authors wrote about religion or translation.

• Multinational orientalists focused on writing both fiction and history fiction. They barely wrote about history or travel. 

• Summary of the analysis for the first research question: the relation between the authors nationality and the text category:

We noticed a few vital things that can help us in our research for the project. One being that the most dominant orientalist author nationality is British. The British authors mostly focused on writing fictional work, translation, and travel. They barely wrote about history, religion or the military. The American orientalist authors, on the other hand, mainly focused on fictional writings, and barely wrote about children literature, travel, or religion. We also observed that only three French orientalist authors are available in our data. Two of them focused on writing about fiction while the remaining authors wrote about travel.Another observation was that German orientalists mainly focused on writing fiction, and only a few authors wrote about religion or translation. Lastly, Multinational orientalists focused on writing both fiction and history fiction, they barely wrote about history or travel. Upon observing our networks with the help of Palladio, in the end of analyzing this research question, we saw that almost all orientalists wrote about fiction. Also, most of the authors are either British or American. To further elaborate on this, in the article “Orientalism: Past and Present” by Tobias Hübinette, the author mentioned that as long as Western countries remain dominant, the concept of Orientalism will always exist. As we previously observed in our data, the most frequent orientalist authors belonged to Western countries. Therefore, this shows us that orientalism is strongly embedded into the Western image to the extent that their power over the globe thrives off of it.

2. Relation between the publication dates and text categories:

 Our team decided to group the different publication dates into centuries; therefore, we were able to study the most and least frequent text categories written by orientalists over the years. 

• During the 18^thcentury, based on the data provided, a shy number of orientalist publications was present. Orientalist publications are mainly about fiction and travel. In “Orientalism: Past and Present” by Tobias Hübinette, the author starts his article by defining orientalism, alongside its connotations. He stated: “Orientalism is a term used for the subject and the works of the orientalists, scholars versed in the cultures, histories, languages and societies of Asia or the Orient, since the 18th century when the tradition was born.” What he stated verifies what we observe in our network analysis.

• During the 19^thcentury, Orientalist authors covered in the data flourished. Their work was mostly fictional; however, they also wrote about travel, translation, and history. 

• The 20^thcentury was a bit similar to the prior one. Orientalist authors mainly focused on fictional writings. They also wrote about travel, religion, history… 

• During our current century, orientalism is still relevant today; however, there is a significant drop in their work published during this century. With the help of our data, we were able to observe only two works related to history published during 2007 and 2015. Therefore, not much orientalist work is being published at our time due to the evolution of the digital world. Or we do not have enough data on the  master spreadsheet in order to see if there are more works published that we haven’t collected information on. Or we might actually find out that these writers are no longer called orientalists. We will never know unless we collect more data and analyze deeper, therefore we recommend that future semesters should work on developing the data on the master spreadsheet and focus on collecting more data on orientalist writers from our century. 

• Summary of the second research question: the relation between the publication dates and the text categories:

For this research question, we decided to group the different publication dates into centuries; in order to study the most and least frequent text categories written by orientalists over the years. During the 18^thcentury, barely any orientalists published their work; however, those who did were very few. Orientalist authors only wrote about fiction and travel during this century. Nevertheless, we saw that they flourished during the 19^thcentury. Their work was mostly fictional; however, they also wrote about travel, translation, and history. The 20th century was a bit similar to the prior one. During the 20th century, Orientalist authors mainly focused on fictional writings, but they also wrote about travel, religion, history. In our current century, the 21st century, orientalism is still relevant; however, we noticed a significant drop in the work published during this century. With the help of our data, we were able to observe only two works related to history published in 2007 and in 2015. Therefore, not much orientalist work is being published at our time due to the evolution of the digital world; or we do not have enough data on the master spreadsheet in order to see if there are more works published that we haven’t collected information on; or we might actually find out that these writers are no longer called orientalists. We will never know unless we collect more data and analyze deeper, therefore we recommend that future semesters should work on developing the data on the master spreadsheet and focus on collecting more data on orientalist writers from our century. 

3. Relation between the publication dates and the author’s nationality: 

• During the 18th century, the predominant orientalist authors covered in the data were mainly from the United Kingdom. Based on the data, there was no presence of any other nationality during this period.

• During the 19th century, the orientalist publications covered flourishes. Orientalist nationalities increased in the UK. Among them were authors from the United States and Germany. In addition, there were other nationalities that had a minor presence such as France and Germany. In the article “Orientalism – Its origins and politics” by Nancy Demerdash, the author mentions that in the nineteenth century, it was a period of rising tourism when Western artists traveled to the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia. This is an alibi to our analysis that orientalist publications flourished in the 19th century because an increase in Westerners visiting the eastern world is directly related to an increase in authors writing  about Orientalism, which is derived from the word “Orient” and meaning “East”. Orientalists are usually Westerners; however, Orientalism in the 19th century takes into consideration the effects of Eastern cultures – located in the Middle East and North Africa. This is why we notice the presence of Syria and Lebanon in our findings. In the article “Orientalism – Its origins and politics” by Nancy Demerdash, she states that Orientalists are hardly found in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Although this is ironic since “Orient” originally referred to that area. We have seen through our analysis that what Nancy stated is accurate because our analysis shows that Orientalists are hardly found in the Eastern areas, in comparison to the West. It is now a clear understanding that the world has been interconnected from the West to the East for much longer than we acknowledged, and Orientalism has helped us as we see elements of it much earlier. 

• In the 20th century, as shown in the data, the orientalists from the United Kingdom were still leading in terms of publications. In addition, the number of USA publications increased. Other nationalities like Russia, Hungary, Tunisia and Lebanon had a minor presence during this period.

• Based on the data provided, during the 21st century, the number of publications has dropped significantly. With a presence limited to orientalists from the United Kingdom and Romania which represent Western countries. We can not generalize here though, but what we should do, is gather more data to back up our analysis. The data gathered in the following semesters should be focused on orientalists in our current century, since it is clear that we do not have enough data during this time. However, in the article “Orientalism: Past and Present” by Tobias Hübinette, he discussed the future of Orientalism which can be applied to our current days. Tobias assumed that the classical meaning of orientalism has survived ‘post-orientalism’ as well as ‘re-orientalism’ in both forms: fundamentalism and nationalism. Moreover, he believed that as long as the West continues to possess dominant power, the concept of orientalism will always exist in one form or another. In our data, we observe 2 Western countries during the 21st century which shows us that orientalism is strongly embedded in the Western self-image to such an extent that their power over the globe thrives off of it.

Moreover, based on the article “ ‘Orientalism,’ Then and Now ” by Adam Shatz,  orientalism played a major role in shaping the contemporary western view on easter countries. The racists orientalist publications during the Bush era misrepresented the easterns. All the orientalist works were based on the fact that religion is a uniquely determining force in the Arab-Islamic world. In addition to that, the majority of the publications are lately biased and feed political purposes rather than being the so-called liberal descriptive orientalism. As stated by Adam Shatz the orientalism of today is  “Eurocentrism, which feeds off the idea that Europe is under threat from Muslim societies and other shit-hole countries, is an undisguised conspiracy theory.”

• Summary of the third research question: The relation between the publication dates and authors nationality:

During the 18th century, the predominant orientalist authors were mainly from the United Kingdom. Based on the data, there was no presence of any other nationality during this period. Whereas during the 19th century, the orientalist publications flourished. Many nationalities joined the United Kingdom, among them were authors from the United States and Germany. In addition, there were other nationalities that had a minor presence such as France, Syria and Lebanon. In the 20th century, the orientalists from the United Kingdom were still leading in terms of the  author’s nationality. In addition, the number of the United States publications increased. Other nationalities like Russia, Hungary, Tunisia and Lebanon had a minor presence during this period. Unfortunately, in the century we live in, the number of publications has dropped significantly. With a presence limited to orientalists from the United Kingdom and Romania.

In conclusion, this project helped us become very familiar with the concept of Orientalism. We undercovered multiple hidden relations and noticed how the Orientalism remains with us even though it is not quite the same as the Orientalism discussed in the past. This is why our team cares to focus on pointing out important information and providing further details regarding orientalist authors and their work. From the data provided, we noticed that it was limited in terms of geographical spread. The majority of the publications were from the UK, and little importance was given to other nationalities. On the other hand, all the data collected focuses mainly on orientalist publications from the 19th and 20th century, while the data collected from other centuries was scarce. Orientalism today plays a major role in shaping the western world view on middle easterners as the article  “ ‘Orientalism,’ Then and Now ” shed lights on, while the data accumulated lacks publications from our current century. 

Furthermore, our team is going to give multiple suggestions so that students who will take this course in the future can use this as a point of reference and not be limited to a certain amount of data. This is why students should focus on finding additional data regarding a wider geographical scope. As a result, they will obtain more information about publications from multiple countries and not just the UK which will allow them to further analyze the following concept. Also, students should work on looking for orientalist work published during different centuries and not just the 19th and 20th century. This means that they will be able to look at diverse results and analyze their findings properly. Students can even observe our current century and understand how the concept of Orientalism has evolved and how it remains valid up until today.  All of these suggestions will make the students’ work much more reliable as they tend to cover all aspects of the topic related to Orientalist authors and their work. 

1. Orientalism: Past and Present – Tobias Hübinette

Tobias Hübinette is a South Korean Associate Professor in Intercultural studies. He is currently organizing a Swedesh research network for Critical Race and Whiteness Studies. Hübinette wrote an article titled “Orientalism: Past and Present”, detailing the subject of orientalism by discussing its meaning, history, evolution, and future.

He begins by defining orientalism, alongside its connotations. He stated: “Orientalism is a term used for the subject and the works of the orientalists, scholars versed in the cultures, histories, languages and societies of Asia or the Orient, since the 18th century when the tradition was born.”

The author later included a section in his article whereby he discussed 3 critiques on Orientalism.

The 1^st criticism provided that Orientalism was a term which changed from a fully accepted name in humanities to one that is rather challenging in modern scholarship. This criticism appeared during the early 1960s and was initiated by educated Asians living in the West in exile.

The 2^nd criticism was made by a Palestinian historian named A.L. Tibawi, who focused on the scientific aspect of Orientalism. In his article “The English-speaking Orientalists”, he wrote about the way orientalists had depicted Islam and the Arab World. Tibawi cared to accentuate the hostility between the Islamic and the Christian world (particularly in the Middle East), which is a historical fact that explains why the study of the Asians was initiated in the first place. He continued his 1^st critique later; “A second critique of English-speaking orientalists”, where he displayed how contemporary orientalists were driven by their desire to understand Islam as a means of combating the Muslims.

The 3^rd criticism was made by a Palestinian literary historian Edward Said. Said was inspired by post-structuralism, feminism and Marxist theories. After Said, there were many studies published on the different orientalists of the West, each that impacted Asians and Asian culture negatively.

After the critiques, Tobias discussed the future of Orientalism. He believed that the classical meaning of orientalism has survived to be termed ‘post-orientalism’. Orientalism has also survived the re-orientalism in both forms: fundamentalism and nationalism. Moreover, he believed that as long as the West continues to possess dominant power, the concept of orientalism will always exist in one form or another. Orientalism is strongly embedded in the Western self-image to such an extent that their power over the globe thrives off of it.

Source: http://www.tobiashubinette.se/orientalism.pdf

2. Orientalism: It’s Origins and Politics – Nancy Demerdash 

In order to excel in our analysis of Orientalism, we need to know the history and concept behind it, beginning with the word “Orient” itself. Orient is defined as being situated or belonging to the east. But here we ask ourselves the question, whose “East” did this “Orient” present? After reading the article, we came to an understanding that by East we mean the Western European view of the East, and not the view of the inhabitants of the East. 

The author states that Orientalists are hardly found in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Although this is ironic since “Orient” originally referred to that area. We have seen in our analysis that what the author claims is accurate because it shows that Orientalists are hardly found in the Eastern areas, in comparison to the West. The author as well mentions that scholars link visual examples of Orientalism alongside the Romantic literature and music of the early nineteenth century, a period of rising tourism when Western artists traveled to the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia. We can relate to this statement because our data from the master spreadsheet lead us to an analysis that orientalism flourished in the 19th century. It is now a clear understanding that the world has been interconnected from the West to the East for much longer than we acknowledged, and Orientalism has helped us as we see elements of it much earlier. 

Edward Said, the author of the ground breaking 1978 text “Orientalism”, argued that european politics created the ideology “Orient” in order for the west to subjugate, control, and authorize views of the east by generalizing and misrepresenting them. Linda Nochlin argued in her essay, “The Imaginary Orient” from 1983, the task of critical art history is to assess the power structures behind any work of art or artist. This in turn led to historians questioning the underlying power dynamics at play in the artistic representations of Orientalism.

The author of the article mentions that Orientalist paintings operate on two things. First, they depict an exotic and therefore racialized, feminized, and often sexualized culture from a distant land. Second, they claim to be a document, an authentic glimpse of a location and its inhabitants. She states that Orientalism was created as a result of imperialism, industrial capitalism, mass consumption, tourism, and settler colonialism in the nineteenth-century.

Orientalism constructs cultural, spatial, and visual mythologies and stereotypes that are often connected to the geopolitical ideologies of governments and institutions. The influence of these mythologies has impacted the formation of knowledge and the process of knowledge production. The author ends the article by asking us an important question: “When we see Orientalist works like Gérôme’s Snake Charmer, we should ask what idea of the “Orient” we see, and why?”

Source: https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/becoming-modern/introduction-becoming-modern/issues-in-19th-century-art/a/orientalism

3. ‘Orientalism,’ Then and Now By Adam Shatz

Edward Said’s Orientalism is one of the most influential works of the intellectual history of the postwar era. Orientalism was published nearly forty years ago, at the time of the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt and the Lebanese civil war, just before the Islamic Revolution in Iran, and four years before Ariel Sharon invaded Lebanon and the massacres in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila.

Orientalism is a work of intellectual history, based on readings of an enormous range of literary and scholarly texts. But, in essence, its thesis can be distilled to the proposition that Orientalism is, in Said’s words, “a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction between ‘the Orient‘ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident.’” He did not say that Orientalist depictions of the West’s Others were merely fictions. The problem with Orientalism was not that it was false in some crudely empirical sense, rather that it was part of a discursive system of “power-knowledge,” a phrase Said borrowed from Foucault. And the aim of Orientalism as a system of representations, sometimes explicit, more often implicit, was to produce an Other, the better to secure the stability and supremacy of the Western self. But the Orientalism of today, both in its sensibility and in its manner of production, is not quite the same as the Orientalism Said discussed forty years ago.

The seemingly unvarying nature of Orientalism provoked a good deal of criticism of Said’s thesis and still does.

After September 11, 2001, the Bush administration reacted with a kind of Orientalist frenzy, heralding the liberation of Muslim women among its reasons for the invasion of Afghanistan, and applying the insights of Raphael Patai, that expert on the so-called Arab mind, to the torture tactics employed at Abu Ghraib. The language of Orientalism during the Bush-era was not always overtly racist, but it often reflected racism based on putative differences in culture—differences that, some “experts” argued, justified a military response, as well as civilizational tutelage in the form of “democracy promotion.” Under President Obama, the grip of Orientalism appeared to relax.

If the uprisings demolished the Orientalist myth that religion is a uniquely determining force in the Arab-Islamic world, however, they also encouraged and flattered another Orientalist fantasy: namely, that Middle Easterners simply want to be like “us,” that Anglo-American liberalism is the natural telos of human societies and that Middle Eastern “difference” is an aberration that will eventually dissolve, with help from Facebook and Google. In the French empire, as Pierre-Jean Luizard argues in his new book, The Republic and Islam, colonization was “a project led by republican elites opposed to the clerical right, who were much more cautious about colonial expansion.” (This, he adds, is an important reason why Arab and Muslim opponents of French rule came to view liberal secularism with such suspicion.) Even the Orientalism that justified the Iraq invasion had its conciliatory side: in the wake of September 11, George W.

Unlike the Orientalism that Said analyzed, it does not require experts like Bernard Lewis and the late Fouad Ajami, a Lebanese scholar who became Dick Cheney’s favorite “native informant.” Say what you will about Ajami and Lewis, they were writers and intellectuals.

The Orientalism of today, the Orientalism of Fox News, Bat Ye’or’s “Eurabia,” and Steve Bannon, is an Orientalism based not on tendentious scholarship but an absence of scholarship.

This is the Orientalism of an era in which Western liberalism has plunged into a deep crisis, exacerbated by anxieties over Syrian refugees, borders, terrorism, and, of course, economic decline. It is an Orientalism in crisis, incurious, vindictive, and often cruel, driven by hatred rather than fascination, an Orientalism of walls rather than border-crossing. The anti-integrationist, Islamophobic form of contemporary Orientalism is enough to make one nostalgic for the lyrical, romantic Orientalism that Mathias Énard elegizes, somewhat wishfully, as a bridge between East and West in his 2015 Goncourt Prize-winning novel, Compass.

If Orientalism has assumed an increasingly hostile, Muslim-hating tone, this is because the “East” is increasingly inside the “West.” This is a clash not of civilizations, but rather a collision of two overlapping phenomena: the crisis of Western neoliberal capitalism, which has aggravated tensions over identity and citizenship, and the collapse of the Middle Eastern state in war, which has fed the refugee crisis.

Source: https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/05/20/orientalism-then-and-now/

This report was written by Razan Muqattesh, Lara El Hariri, and Houssam Almas Zounji