Pacific Geopolitics During The 21st Century

There was breach of faith by withholding information and not being upfront during the communication process between different parties. This situation was also caused by cultural differences like relationship building, “Guanxi”, emphasis on personal relationships versus factual-based legalistic approach, completely varied styles of doing business, and also

The western world does not study the Orient strictly for imperialistic purposes as this can be realized by examining the arguments of Said, Lewis and Buruma. In developing his argument, Said believes that the Western world’s only intention in studying the Orient is so that it may benefit in the form of imperialism. Said is intent on making his thesis clear as he directly, and strongly, argues on page three that Orientalism is “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” Over the course of the rest of the introduction to Orientalism, Said does not sway from this conviction.

In this work, he expresses the belief that the “the so-called objective truth of the white man’s superiority built and maintained by the classical European colonial empires also rested on a violent subjugation of African and Asian peoples (Said, Pg. 37). Said believed that Western history should be viewed from this premise; that our perception of Arab and African history is viewed through a looking glass tinted by these prejudices. Concerning Edward Said, the New York Times wrote in a summary of the century’s achievements was “one of the most important literary critics alive” (Said, Pg. 149). Thirty years after its publication in 1978, Orientalism remains an important ...much debated book. (Said, Pg.

To a large extent Bush’s declaration of the War on Terror followed by the establishment of Guantanamo Bay is by far the largest reflection of Orientalism since it defines the ‘terrorist’. Bush’s speech on the War on Terror, not only defined the ‘terrorist’ but directly associated it with the East, creating the ‘other’ as the enemy. Orientalism can be seen by the Bush’s administration to define, and arguably create the ‘terrorist’ since he characterizes them through an orientalist perspective. It can be argued that the War on Terror was an orientalist instrument used to create the image for ‘knowing’ the Terrorist. This is crucial as knowing the terrorist, legitimizes any policy of action to eradicate the perceived terrorist. This can be seen most prominently in Bush’s speech on the War of Terror where he tactically separates the West from the East. Said’s book would support this argument as it can be perceived that the created an ‘imaginative geography in which the Occident and Orient are separated’. Therefore, Bush divides the US and the ‘others’ by labelling them as ‘evil’ and uncivilized beings that hate western values of freedom

The Near East or the Orient was a “place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other.”[1] Edward Said describes the Orient as not an inert fact of nature but both Orient and Occident as man made.[2] The argument Said presents is that the Orient is an “idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West.”[3]

The Orient refers to the space occupied by the Middle East and Northern Africa which exists in connection and opposition to the Occident--Europe (Said 5). It exists in Western eyes as the prime subject of domination and control (Said 3) as "the Oriental" is viewed as less-than-human, purely for study and academia (Said 27); it is he who is also "gullible", lazy and unmotivated, and lacks European morals such as compassion for animal welfare (Said 38). It is the "bad" Orient and must be corrected and taught proper morals (Said 99). Its women are submissive and to be spoken for by the Orientalist foreigner (Said 6), who visits not to learn about or appreciate culture but to be spectator and to gaze upon what he sees as "exotic" (Said 21), she has no temperament or lived experience beyond what is assigned to her by this outsider (Said 6). The Orient is not a real place

As Said writes in Orientalism, “One of the important developments in Orientalism was the distillation of essential ideas about the Orient– its sensuality, its tendency to despotism, its abhorrent mentality, its habits of inaccuracy, its backwardness– into a separate and unchallenged coherence. This information seemed to be morally neutral and objectively valid” (Said 205). The scope of Said’s model of Orientalism may tempt one to reduce the complexity of Lady Mary’s rhetoric by understanding her letters simply to be a replication of the Eurocentrism and authoritarianism described by Said’s Orientalism where the colonizing subject observes the objectified other. However, to diminish the subtleties of Montagu’s encounters with an uncomplicated binary of domination and subordination would be to ignore the multiplicity produced by Montagu’s own dual identity. As a Westerner, Montagu indeed fits the mold of the subject observing the East (the object), but as a woman she herself is an object viewing an object. The power dynamics at play produce two very different outlooks, which should neither be reduced to fit into traditional Oriental discourse, nor upheld as an example of writing which entirely transcends Orientalism

In other words, not only construction but deconstruction of the dubious entity “Orient” require the West (the Orient’s agent) to speak for the Orient. Another problem is what Said calls “a triumph of Orientalism” (323) today, the major source of which is no longer Britain or France, but the United States, the democratically totalizing economy power. It means cultural domination on the one hand (“Orientals” educated in the United States repeat the Orientalist cliché), and economic absorption of poor nations on the other (consumerism in the Orient). A simple example Said takes up is “the paradox of an Arab regarding himself as an ‘Arab’ of the sort put out by Hollywood” (325). The Orient, in short, playacts its image as imagined by the West. This is far more problematic than the former form of Orientalism because the subject position of an “Oriental” is now realized only as the subject that (re-)presents itself as the Other before the Western eyes, as imagined by the West: and this Western gaze is what the Oriental subject identifies her/himself. It is disappointing in a sense that Said does not develop his arguments more than the idea that this phenomenon of cultural domination is only the Orient’s

In his book Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said articulates on the hybrid nature of postcolonial identities:

One example of this Orientalist view can be seen in the work of political advisor, Samuel P Huntington. Huntington’s Orientalist views about Islam had an immense effect on American foreign policy during Bush’s presidency. For Huntington there is “fault line” (Esposito, 1999, p. 230) drawn between Islam and the West due to ongoing conflict and this divide is likely to get more hostile due to Islam’s “bloody borders” (Huntington, 1993). In this modern day example we see how Orientalism presents religions, such as Islam, in a derogatory way which is often said inforce that the West’s identity “radically different” from that of the Orient (King, 2005, p. 275).

From the late eighteenth to the mid twentieth century, European countries - predominantly England and France - oversaw the expansion and collapse of their empires, during which time they had come to understand their Eastern colonies through the lens of ‘Orientalism.’ A term coined by the literary critic Edward Said in 1978, Orientalism refers to the project through which Western artists and intellectuals fabricated an image of ‘the Orient’ - an area stretching between ‘India and the Bible Lands’ - in order to legitimise their control over it. This project characterised the East as an inferior, post-civilised realm, where order had been displaced by - as Said writes - an ‘Oriental backwardness.’ However, by the end of the nineteenth

Said’s book Orientalism shows the narrow-mindedness of western scholars and nurtures a substantial challenge to those scholars who deliberately write in stereotyped and dehumanizing ways about “the East” in order to build an imaginary costume-made “Other”. According to him, the west intended to create this distinction to highlight and emphasis the superiority of the western identity over the

Edward Said was one of the most important cultural figures of the late twentieth century. In 1978 Said made the influential argument that scholarly writing in the United States and Europe was misrepresenting the cultural representations of the east. He called this study of the East Orientalism and the researchers or scholars – Orientalists. Said argued that the Orient is the stage of where the whole east is confined, including the Middle East, East Asia and Northern Africa. Said believed that these bias perceptions hindered a true understanding of the wide array of cultural diversity in Eastern culture. His work [the book Orientalism (1978)] is an examination of the way the West perceives the East in a truthful but slightly inaccurate and misinforming way. It is an academic piece and it is in many ways revolutionary due to how he points out that Western scholars invented the Orient from their own political and psychological needs to create a dehumanized “other”. In this critical analysis I shall be only reviewing the introduction to his work. I will be proving how occasionally his work may be misleading and hypocritical while, however, not denying the fact of this book making a huge impact on the understanding of the East and their cultural diversity and so forth by Americans and Europeans.

According to a paper by Buchowski, Orientalism was originally defined by Edward Said as “a set of discursive practices through which the West structured the imagined East politically, socially, military, ideologically, scientifically and artistically.” (Buchowski abstract) In film Orientalism most commonly refers to offensively portraying characteristics, customs or qualities of people in the Orient, an imagined name for the countries in Asia and North Africa. In academic discourse, Orientalism is a tool used to enforce Eurocentrism, the belief that Western society is the center of the world. (Shohat and Stam 2) Edward Said claimed that “the European representation of these people is a typical cultural creation that enables those powerful to legitimize their domination over those subjugated and conquered.” (Buchowski abstract)

The way in which Said and Huntington define culture within their texts Orientalism and The Clash of Civilisation, divulges each author’s position within and perception of both the Arab and Western Worlds. The difference in each author’s ideology and contexts - Said (a professor in comparative lit with a Palestinian background, writing in 1978, a time of conflict and devastation in the middle east) and Huntington, (an American political scientist writing at a time in which his country is at a height of its power), causes what is described by Said as “The clash of definitions” (SD). Said views culture as a culmination and product of ideologies, morals and beliefs propagated by members of society. Huntington views culture as more definite, established and finite. Said defines a specific culture in relation to others whist Huntington believes each culture is its own separate entity. Through the exploration of these contrasting views it can be interpreted that a key difference between each definition is that Said defines culture as more broad and capable of being influenced whilst Huntington views it only as a powerful influencer. This may also reflect their positions as either from the West or the Orient.