Summary
Anwar Abdel Malek, quoted at length by Said in Orientalism’s Chapter One, IV as the critic who characterized the Orientalized Orient: an object of study stamped with a constitutive, essentialist otherness, passive and non-sovereign, defined and acted by others (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.105-106 / printed p.96-97).
Details
- Said asks whether any other than a political master-slave relation could produce the Orientalized Orient as Abdel Malek characterized it, and quotes his analysis at two levels: position and problematic — the Orient and Orientals as an “object” of study, passive, non-participating, non-autonomous and non-sovereign with regard to itself — and thematic — an essentialist conception of the Orient expressed through an ethnist typology that proceeds towards racism, with a homo Sinicus, a homo Arabicus and a homo Africanus set against the European as the normal man (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.106 / printed p.97).
- In Abdel Malek’s account as quoted, the hegemonism of possessing minorities, unveiled by Marx and Engels, and the anthropocentrism dismantled by Freud are accompanied by europocentrism in the human and social sciences from the eighteenth to the twentieth century (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.106 / printed p.97).
- Said takes from Abdel Malek an index of Orientalism’s crisis: specialists and the public at large had become aware of the time-lag between the conceptions, methods and instruments of the human and social sciences and those of Orientalism (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.114 / printed p.105).
- Said returns to Abdel Malek’s phrase for contemporary attitudes in the press and the popular mind: no better instance exists today of what Abdel Malek calls “the hegemonism of possessing minorities” and anthropocentrism allied with Europocentrism than the white middle-class Westerner’s belief that it is his prerogative not only to manage the nonwhite world but to own it (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.117 / printed p.108).