Edward Said grew up in Palestine before moving to the United States. His lived experience and his study of Western perceptions of the Middle East were the basis for Orientalism, which contends that Western superiority complexes are concealed behind depictions of the East that portray its inhabitants as savage, culturally antiquated, exotic, and overly sexualized. Said’s work was the catalyst for important conversations around Eurocentric depictions of the East. But who was he, and how did he become the poster child for postcolonial art theory?
Biography and Background
Scholar Edward Said was born to a relatively wealthy family in West Jerusalem in British-ruled Mandatory Palestine in 1935. He was raised there until his family relocated to Cairo in 1947, ahead of impending armed conflict. Four years later, Said moved to the United States as a teenager to attend boarding school, which laid the groundwork for his prestigious higher education.
The prolific author earned his BA in English from Princeton and his MA and PhD in English Literature from Harvard. After receiving his doctorate, Edward Said accepted a teaching position at Columbia University in New York in 1963, where he remained for the entirety of his 40-year career until his death from leukemia in 2003. Said married his wife, Mariam, in 1970, and the couple had two children who followed in their father’s footsteps: a daughter who is now an author and a son who is a law professor. Widely respected in his field, Said lectured at over 200 universities both in the United States and internationally.
Said’s childhood in the Middle East, his move to the United States as a teenager, and his place in the elite circles of scholarship afforded him an interesting perspective from which to view Western culture. As someone firmly rooted in the American education system, Said was immersed in the description of “others” as put forth by artists, politicians, authors, and scholars. However, as someone who had grown up in Mandatory Palestine, he knew firsthand the realities of life and culture in the Middle East. He saw a shocking disconnect between what he had experienced and how it was being portrayed in the West.
Orientalism: The Concept and the Publication
The book that made Said a household name, Orientalism, was published in 1978, about 15 years into his teaching career. Said categorized nearly all Western interpretations of the East as inherently warped and problematic because they were the perceptions of outsiders looking in who wished to distinguish themselves as different from their subjects.
In an article for The New Yorker, Pankaj Mishra explains that “Said unexpectedly described himself as an ‘Oriental subject’ and implicated almost the entire Western canon, from Dante to Marx, in the systematic degradation of the Orient.”
Not only that, but Western depictions of “the Orient” often portrayed numerous cultures situated across modern-day Egypt, Turkey, Algeria, and Morocco (among others) as monolithic despite their vast differences in religious practices, languages, social customs, and histories. Although the titles of some works of art indicated their settings in specific locations, the Orient was often depicted as a mythical, overarching construct that contained the entirety of the Near East and Middle East.
Said traced some of the roots of modern-day Orientalism to the turn of the eighteenth century when a group of “savants” traveled with the French military to Egypt to document clothing, architecture, art, and more in a series of writings and illustrations. The subsequent interest in the East fueled an influx of motifs, images, and styles that coincided with the colonization of many Eastern countries by European countries. The result was a set of data that European consumers regarded as fact and which characterized colonized groups of people as in need of the refinement, religious salvation, and “help” that imperial conquest purported to deliver.
Problems With Orientalist Imagery
Many notable art historians of Said’s time expounded on his thoughts in relation to their field. They pointed to much of the Orientalist art of the nineteenth century as containing inherent bias. Artists like Eugène Delacroix, Jean-Léon Gérôme, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres came under fire for their interpretations of Eastern scenes of harems, slave markets, and everyday life.
Linda Nochlin argued in her essay “The Imaginary Orient” that many Western depictions of the East were executed with a “licked” finish that made them look almost photographic or hyper-realistic. This method, rather than a more abstract or painterly application, made the oil paintings seem as though they were accurate, authoritative images of a world many of their viewers had never experienced in person. Many European works of art from this era deliberately omitted modernity in any form to cause their settings to appear frozen in a time long past, unable or unwilling to move forward along with the rest of the world, and instead reinforced themes of chaos, antiquated living conditions, and exoticism.
Linda Nochlin also believed that works such as Gérôme’s Snake Charmer included specific details, such as the dilapidated tile work on the wall and broken pavers on the ground, that spoke to Western ideas of Eastern laziness. Whether or not it was an intentional aim of the work of Gérôme and other artists like him, these stereotypes furthered the political agenda of colonial powers by justifying their presence in colonized territories that were supposedly lacking Western morality, technology, manufacturing processes, and work ethic.
Postcolonial Art History
So, how might Said’s concept of Orientalism be related to postcolonial art history? Orientalism is based on the Western idea of superiority as compared to the East, but it can also apply more broadly to relationships between dominant and marginalized geopolitical entities or people groups.
When applied to art history, the imbalance of power among these groups allows those from dominant entities to create art in greater quantity and disseminate it more widely. For example, when looking at the art created by American artists in the early nineteenth century at most museums, it would be difficult to find a significantly representative number of works by Black or Native American artists when considering the proportions of the US population at the time.
Additionally, art history has been written from the viewpoint of those in power to the neglect of other voices who were also creating art. Postcolonial thought insists that art historians must go beyond merely magnifying underrepresented artists of the past and, like feminist art historians, discuss and dismantle the power dynamics at fault.
In essence, postcolonialism seeks to answer the question “What would history look like if it were written from the point of view of the periphery?” posed by Michael Hatt and Charlotte Klonk in Art History: A Critical Introduction to Its Methods.
Political Activism
By all accounts, Edward Said was a complicated man. His interest in the West’s relationship with countries in the Middle East did not end with his thoughts on Orientalism. In addition to his career as a professor and an inspiring author, Said was also an extremely active advocate for the political rights of Palestine.
He pushed for a two-state solution to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and was a member of the Palestinian National Council for nearly 15 years. His political views were not a piece of his belief system that he kept relegated to the sidelines, but rather, his activism was integrated into the very fabric of his teaching and writing.
His activism was made particularly potent by his prestigious standing as a Columbia professor and well-known author, as well as his eloquence, which made him a target for enemies. While the criticism of Said’s views was often more innocuous, at one point, his Columbia office was set on fire, and he regularly received death threats. Said’s outspoken criticism of US foreign policy in the 1970s even landed him under FBI surveillance. Despite the pressure exerted on him by these actions, Said never allowed intimidation to thwart his efforts.
Edward Said’s Legacy
Like many before and since, Edward Said set into motion a school of thought that has taken on a life of its own. Orientalism and postcolonialism are now taught in undergraduate art history courses. A new generation of students is seeking to understand the influence of Western biases on depictions of Eastern subjects.
While it might be reductive to view certain works of visual art, theater, music, or literature that depict “the Orient” solely through a postcolonial lens, it is also dismissive to assume that the imperial zeitgeist of the nineteenth century did not affect them at all. Said’s work exhibits the mark of a truly brilliant mind in that he asked big questions of scholars during his career, which are still being debated and discussed today.
