In Orientalism, Edward Said argues that orientalism “as a mode of discourse [produced] supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles” (Said 2). Originally, the discourse of orientalism came into being as a way through which European culture and society could gain strength and identity. This reflects how “anyone deploying a discourse must position themselves as if they were the subject of the discourse”(Foucault 95-96). Thus we can see how through the racial discourse of orientalism Europeans were able to construct this “other” in order to help make sense of their own identity and place in the world. By making this claim about the “Orient”, Europeans could transfer the embodied knowledge of their own culture and society into the archive. Over time this discourse would emerge as a “Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient,” it would gain status as truth because of its relationship to white patriarchal power. Orientalism would work to both assert and reinforce European hegemony.
Within the discourse of orientalism, I explore how the pilgrimage acts as a scenario which functions “as a meaning making paradigm that structures social environments, behaviors, and potential outcomes” (Taylor 28). “… From one end of the nineteen century to the other—- after Napoleon, that is —- the Orient was a place of pilgrimage, and every major work belonging to a genuine if not always to an academic Orientalism took its form, style, and intention from the idea of pilgrimage there” (Said 168). This reflects how through their travels to the Orient, European travelers would make claims which allowed moves of the repertoire to enter the archive.
This morning when I checked my twitter feed, I found and interesting article from NPR News titled, “U.S. Discovers Huge Afghan Mineral Wealth”. My 1st thought, “well, we’re never gonna leave” and my 2nd thought “how do you discover something in a country populated by other people? Is this like how…
“Miles from a place fondly called home,
a small plastic bottle of FIJI Water peers at me
through the doors of a convenience store,
teasing and tormenting, begging me to take it back.
I reach out fondly,
only to jerk my hand away.
They say it’s untouched by civilization,
They say it provides jobs,
They swear to carbon-free emissions,
Then why does my body break down in sobs?
Water that leaves my people dehydrated and dead,
Water that kills,
Water that props up an illegal military regime,
Who knew it could have so much power?
Your colonial thirst for a taste of my paradise,
Highly dense and hyper-sexualized,
Life reduced to an exotic merchandise,
The blood of my people actualized.
This plastic bottle is all I have left of a place I’ll never see
With some half-forgotten memories of a country that doesn’t remember me”
“
—
Prerna Lal (Pani, Memory and Post-Colonial Identity)
One of the problems with post colonialism in an ex imperial country is that it essentially strips a person of their identity in a new setting with them unknowingly going along with it.
For example, asian rock music will never be taken that seriously by either side as it’s viewed as intrusion…
Rap on Orientalism by Mickey Boston
American Imperialism
Orientalism is better grasped as a set of constraints upon and limitations of thought than it is simply as a positive doctrine. If the essence of Orientalism is the ineradicable distinction between Western superiority and Oriental inferiority, then we must be prepared to note how in its development and subsequent history Orientalism deepened and even hardened the distinction. When it became common practice during the nineteenth century for Britain to retire its administrators from India and elsewhere once they reached the age of fifty-five, then a further refinement in Orientalism had been achieved; no Oriental was ever allowed to see a Westerner as he aged and degenerated, just as no Westerner needed to ever see himself mirrored in the eyes of the subject race as anything but a vigorous, rational, ever alert young Raj.
“
—
Edward Said “Orientalism” pg. 42
In this quote the visual impact of colonialism is distinct. Power and control must appear strong and thus by default shed any connections to frailty. Imperialism is tacitly maintained by a visual propaganda. This form of control edits the mundane reality which connects all individuals regardless of culture, class, and education and suspends a mysticism that all parties become complicit in.
Whilst this visual control was arguably a flourish to the grander mechanisms of the colonial empire, it is now diffuse in the terrain of corporations and stylists, and is exercised tactically with immense competence by individuals savvy to the complex continually changing rules.
Neoliberal globalization involves privatizations, the deepening of liberalisation and the radical deregulation of financial and investment regimes. This scenario was created so that the main beneficiaries would be the multinational corporations whose headquarters are principally located in countries in the industrialized North. The advance of the power of TNCs over all areas of the economy and society take place to the detriment and dismantling of national states in the South that maintain an exclusively functional role regarding transnational capital. The reality that the peoples face is that corporate rights are superimposed over fundamental and collective human rights. The corporations linked to energy that include oil and electricity companies have appropriated the energy resources and have converted what are rights into sources of profit, such as access to water or energy that constitute indispensable rights for the fulfillment of the right to a dignified life.
“
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Transnational Institute | Permanent People’s Tribunal on European Multinationals In Latin America – Union Fenosa
My blog is an “archive” devoted to exploring how through discourses “knowledge” in the archive comes into “being”. “[Within] any society, there are manifold relations of power which permeate, characterize and constitute the social body, and these relations of power cannot themselves be established, consolidated, nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation, and functioning of a discourse” (Foucault 93). By deconstructing the discourses of Orientalism and Neoliberalism I hope to illuminate how these bodies of knowledge work to reproduce and disseminate ideologies that are used to perpetuate and reinforce a social and racial hierarchy, in which white patriarchal power is hegemonic. I also hope to explore how war functions as a scenario and meaning making paradigm. In the Americas war is arguably the primary vehicle through which certain discourses have become hegemonic and come to help us make sense of the world and our place in it.
