SAiD's LEcTUre

Said's lecture discusses the same concerns he has throughout his book, Orientalism. The book focuses on the history of "Orientalism" and how it was culturally dominated and overthrown by the British, FRench and US. The majority of Middle Eastern scholarship has been written by an outsider looking in and not so much as looking into the society and way of life of the Middle Eastern people but from a European's imagination. Right from the introduction Said makes it clear that Europeans have "politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively produced the Orient" (3). It is alarming to read that an entire region of people and their history has been distorted, recreated, and presented as facts through the minds and scholarships of others. Throughout the years, scholars have chosen to rely on previous studies of Orientalism, and have failed to look past the biased and misinterpreted reality of the Middle East. When scholars stop searching for accurate history, unbiased truths and realities and begin to base their work solely on primary resources and previous studies, their work corrupts the integrity of history and, in this case, dehumanizes the Middle Eastern people. Studies and research about the Middle East have to be revolutionized in order to present an accurate, unbiased knowledge about the Orient.

Said stresses that the repeated images and representations about the Middle East reinforce the static idea of the 'Orient'. The Orient then becomes a representation, an idea far away from the West. The West then constructs an image of the Orient creating 'Orientalism.' And then there is the 'Oriental,' the threatening male to society and especially white woman, the seductive female who invites domination. And these images are constantly being repeated in movie, media, and television. Said's work defies the fact that there is no more to be learned and studied about the ORient because he is writing as an insider looking out and that is the scholarship that needs to be especially considered. Writing from an outsider's point of view provides an alternate prospective, but it should not be accredited as much as the writer within the topic. I value Said's work because he is from the Middle East talking and writing within the Middle East, I will consider previous scholarship but their perspective is from the outside looking in, therefore their work has a foreigner's point of view and to the foreigner everything is foreign and that is the kind of perspective they will provide. I do not mean anyone who is not from the Middle East cannnot write about it, I mean both perspectives needed to be understood together. A topic needs all sides of the story to be meaningfully understood. While others write about Arabs, Said's work speaks for the Middle Eastern people, but not in the way that others have spoken for and about them; instead, he challenges previous studies and forces scholars to rethink the images, representations, and legitimacy of previous scholarship concerning the Middle Eastern people.