Edward Said: The Subversive Intellectual And His Subversion Of Orientalism

As a literary and cultural critic and social commentator, Said has occupied a salient place and his works has been frequently quoted by scholars in various disciplines. However no one has ever seriously tried to approach the inner connections and logic of his theories and explain how Said gradually builds up his system of theory in China. This paper tries to give a more systematic study of Said's theories concerning the conception and representation of the Orient through examining his positioning as a subversive intellectual.Chapter one is about the historical and cultural background of Said's theory and analyzes his stance as a subversive intellectual. Said lives in an era in which the decolonizing movement is in full swing and theories under the title of post-modernism are full of vigor and vitality. Imbued in this atmosphere, Said poses himself as a subversive intellectual and challenges the prevalent Orientalism. Said's theories, especially those about the relationship between the West and the East are of great significance. And his theories contribute much to the later discussions around post-colonialism.Chapter two analyzes the primary principles underlying Said's writings which serve as the driving force for him. Believing that criticism and knowledge are secular and worldly, Said reveals that the whole academy of Orientalism is constructed to be a way of domination and having authority over the Orient and the discourses about the Orient are mainly ethnocentric. The Orient is depicted as inferior while the west is superior. Said's main critique is directed against the way in which the Western (defined more specifically as British, French, and to a certain extent more recently, North American) economic, political and academic powers have developed a dichotomized discourse in which an ascendant West is juxtaposed with a silent Eastern Other according to terms and definitions specified and determined by the West itself.Chapter three is about how people could avoid the determining restrictions of the perspectives and underlying rules set down by Orientalism. The binary division between the Orient and the West has become an episteme in Foucault's sense thatgoverns all discourses about the Orient. What's more, there has been a long tradition of Orientalism which also influences the later production of Orientalist discourses. Thus all the discourses concerning Orientalism have to abide by the "consensus" reached by the Orientalists. Both these two factors combined to make other modes of narration about the Orient almost impossible. But here Said digresses from Foucault, from whom he quotes and learns a lot in his early days by taking up the theme of cultural resisitance. Orientalism, as an episteme is still being able to be transcended. According to Said, by being an exile in the actual or in the metaphorical sense, people can gain multiple perspectives and thus transcend the episteme of Orientalism which is also a kind of counternarrative.Chapter four is about discourse politics and cultural resistance. According to Foucault, discourse and power imply each other. On the one hand, power governs the production of knowledge. On the other hand, knowledge creates more power in return. Based on Said's writings, the author points out Said's views about the political purposes of Orientalist discourses: to gather information and prepare for colonization and domination, to legitimize the colonization and domination, to produce docile "objects". However, Said points out that at the same time, resistance has always been there in his later book called Culture and Imperialism. In the later part of this chapter the author goes on to analyze the sources of cultural resistance based on the reading of Said. For him, cultural resistance comes from both inside and outside of the colonies.Chapter five is about the practical significance of Said's theories. The transcendence of exiles enables a new mode of narration about the Orient. These narrations that digress from the Orientalist perspective are called counter-...