The Reading— Orientalism Reconsidered by Edward W. Said

 The Said reading was not my favorite one.  My interest for Orientalism is waning.  I thought this reading was going to be an account of rhetorical practices like the Xing Lu readings, but it is not.  I’m not sure I got it.  I had to read passages over and over.  It touches on issues of religious dogma and how that effected in the distinct schools (as I call them) of thought.       

Said believes the border between the Occidental and the Oriental is factor that influences the issues around reconsidering Orientalism.  These issues are relationship between power and knowledge, the role of intellectual; relationship between different kinds of text, txt and context, text and history (89). Said describes the Arab/Muslim world as being in constant flux and it is this flux that leads to segregation within Arab/Islamic thought.  There is segregation of thought based on power and age, institutional defense, and religious beliefs/practices.  All of these points of separation in Orientalism are political.

There is a resistance to the politics of Orientalism in academia based on who studies, and where Orientalism is studied. Said describes the  problem as “point of departure the right of formerly un-or-mis-represented human groups to speak for and represent themselves in domains defined, politically and intellectually[…] usurping their signifying and representing functions” (91). I infer this to mean that the people who are writing about Orientalism are not themselves oriental, and this is what causes the misunderstanding an resistance to Orientalism.