Analysis Of Colonial Discourse Aside: Why Orientalism Was A Purely Intellectual Enterprise
Colonial Discourse Aside: Why Orientalism Was a Purely Intellectual Enterprise
(word count: 1994)
Orientalism as an academic discipline is oftentimes given a place of primacy in colonial discourse. Colonial politicians invoked it as a justification for colonial conquests. Administrative officers looked to it to accommodate their governance to the natives’ traditions and laws. Orientalism had been unavoidably political. And yet, this characterization had little explanatory power: it punctuates the orientalism’s histories and chooses to highlight its function for the age of western imperialism. It should not be the case. Orientalism did not exist for imperial agendas. Social, cultural, artistic, economic, technological, and intellectual studies of the East emerged first; colonial statesmen and diplomats modified it for political use afterwards. The purpose of orientalist scholarship was about intellectual curiosity to understand peoples and their cultures perceived as different, however inaccurately and prejudicially. …show more content…
If orientalism was about the way(s) that Western people thought of the East, its existence certainly dated from the earliest transregional exchange and communication. Europeans first officially met non-Europeans through war: The Greeks battled Persians, Alexander the Great claimed Egypt, the Roman Republic claimed Carthage, the Roman ruled Egypt, and, during the Middle Ages, the crusades swept through the Near East. These armed conflicts, however, seem not to complicate orientalism with politics and ideology since few evidence suggested that these warriors had heavily relied on such rhetoric to legitimatize conquests. Knowledge of the East was borne by political interactions, but did not serve it. One must not confine orientalism merely to discourses about western colonialism in early modern
(word count: 1994)
Orientalism as an academic discipline is oftentimes given a place of primacy in colonial discourse. Colonial politicians invoked it as a justification for colonial conquests. Administrative officers looked to it to accommodate their governance to the natives’ traditions and laws. Orientalism had been unavoidably political. And yet, this characterization had little explanatory power: it punctuates the orientalism’s histories and chooses to highlight its function for the age of western imperialism. It should not be the case. Orientalism did not exist for imperial agendas. Social, cultural, artistic, economic, technological, and intellectual studies of the East emerged first; colonial statesmen and diplomats modified it for political use afterwards. The purpose of orientalist scholarship was about intellectual curiosity to understand peoples and their cultures perceived as different, however inaccurately and prejudicially. …show more content…
If orientalism was about the way(s) that Western people thought of the East, its existence certainly dated from the earliest transregional exchange and communication. Europeans first officially met non-Europeans through war: The Greeks battled Persians, Alexander the Great claimed Egypt, the Roman Republic claimed Carthage, the Roman ruled Egypt, and, during the Middle Ages, the crusades swept through the Near East. These armed conflicts, however, seem not to complicate orientalism with politics and ideology since few evidence suggested that these warriors had heavily relied on such rhetoric to legitimatize conquests. Knowledge of the East was borne by political interactions, but did not serve it. One must not confine orientalism merely to discourses about western colonialism in early modern