Marxist critiques of Edward Said's "Orientalism"

[TheOneWhoKnocks]

So I am reading this classic book for a seminar, and though I am enjoying it immensely, I am perplexed by his assertion that all European thought (including Marx's) from the 19th century was shaped and -- to some extent at least -- a product of Orientalist discourse. Is anyone aware of Marxist critiques of this argument? I have heard "Marx at the Margins" is a good read, but I don't have the time to read another book at the moment.

[Admiral Swagmeister G-Funk]

I don't think there's a need to critique it really. It doesn't really negate Marxism and isn't a bad theory in itself.

[Os Cangaceiros]

There are many criticisms of the book. Wikipedia actually does a pretty good job of covering some of what they are in a concise manner, in the Orientalism (book) wiki page

[Engels]

There's this bit from an article by Loren Goldner (http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/universality.html):


Edward Said, for example, has written a popular book called Orientalism which presents the relations between the West and the Orient (and implicitly between any two cultures) as the encounter of hermetically-sealed "texts" which inevitably distort and degrade. In this encounter, according to Said, the West from early modern times counterposed a "discourse" of a "dynamic West" to a "decadent, stagnant" Orient. Since Said does not even entertain the possibility of world-historical progress, the idea that Renaissance Europe represented an historical breakthrough for humanity, which was, by the 15th century, superior to the social formations of the Islamic world is not even worth discussing. Such a view not only trivializes the breakthrough of Renaissance Europe; it also trivializes the achievements of the Islamic world, which from the 8th to the 13th centuries towered over the barbaric West, as well as the achievements of T'ang and Sung China, which during the same centuries probably towered over both of them. One would also never know, reading Said, that in the 13th century the flower of Islamic civilization was irreversibly snuffed out by a "text" of Mongol hordes (presumably also Oriental) who levelled Bagdad three times. Were Said somehow transported back to the wonder that was Islamic civilization under the Abbasid caliphate, the Arabs and Persians who helped lay the foundations for the European Renaissance would have found his culturalism strange indeed, given the importance of Plato and Aristotle in their philosophy and of the line of prophets from Moses to Jesus in their theology. Said's text- bound view of the hermetically-sealed relations between societies and in world history (which for him does not meaningfully exist) is the quintessential statement of a culturalism that, which a pretense of radicalism, has become rampant in the past two decades.

[khad]

This is probably the most in-depth critique of Said I've seen from a Marxist perspective:

http://www.amazon.com/Theory-Nations-Classes-Literatures-Thinkers/dp/1844672131

Also, wiki's summary of criticisms are trash, precisely much of it comes from people like Bernard Lewis (a guy who was a GWBush consultant for muslimology). You'll be much better off reading Marxist critiques.
Personally, I believe that Said overlooked the significance of the internal debates that were being had during the age of enlightenment in Europe preceding the age of imperialism, debates that created the discursive framework through which later colonial acquisitions were analyzed. Specifically, I'm talking about the role of the peasantry and urban-rural conflict. Pretty much everything negative that Marx attributed to Indians--superstition, backwardness, feudalism, etc, what have you--were things he also said about the German peasantry.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

There's this bit from an article by Loren Goldner (http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/universality.html):

It is true that ignoring the temporal progression of history can prevent people from seeing the significance of the change, but it is also true that orientalist discourses tend to overlook the "internal" complexity. Thus, when Marx talks about "Oriental Despotism" he lumps Japan, China, Indian states, Persia and the Ottoman Empire together and ignores their structural differences, and perhaps also overlooks some of the similarities between those empires and European ones.


This is probably the most in-depth critique of Said I've seen from a Marxist perspective:

http://www.amazon.com/Theory-Nations-Classes-Literatures-Thinkers/dp/1844672131

Interesting - is there a summary or an abstract of his arguments?

[khad]

Interesting - is there a summary or an abstract of his arguments?
You might be able to nab some stuff off JSTOR if they don't throw you in prison first.

[islandmilitia]

Edward Said, for example, has written a popular book called Orientalism which presents the relations between the West and the Orient (and implicitly between any two cultures) as the encounter of hermetically-sealed "texts"...

This critique is based on the most superficial reading of Said possible. Said does not treat texts as isolated from their environment. In fact, a large part of his project is precisely to show that texts which we do not normally think of as having a close connection with material processes of colonialism and resource extraction, like the English novels of the nineteenth century, were actually part of a discourse, orientalism, that was important because of the way it made colonialism appear legitimate and justified. In other words, when Said talks about the representations of the non-European world that emerge in texts like travelogues and later on the texts of American social science, he is not looking at those representations for their own sake, within an isolated sphere of literary production, he is interested in the historical role they play, in terms of their relationship with the political and economic structures of colonialism. This is made explicit in the original introduction to Orientalism when Said writes that "what we must respect and try to grasp is the sheer knitted-together strength of Orientalist discourse, its very close ties to the enabling socio-economic and political institutions". At a later point in the same introduction Said also makes very clear what orientalism is not when he says that "Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field that is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions; nor is it a large and diffuse collection of texts about the Orient", this clarification being in exact opposition to the assertion Goldner makes in the first line of his critique. The practical example from his works that most closely demonstrates Said's drive to historicize texts and situate them in the context of the material process of colonialism is his sustained discussion of Mansfield Park in Culture and Imperialism, where Said points out that the very structure and plot of the novel is dependent on an assumed background of colonial exploitation because the wealth of the male protagonist is derived from plantation agriculture in the British empire, and the temporary departure of that protagonist from his English estate win order to visit the plantations is used as a plot device, to change the dynamics between the characters of the novel. No-one reading that analysis can think that Said treats texts as sealed from history.

In my view, Marxists have yet to engage with the depth of Said's critique.