Review of Edward Said On Orientalism

I would like to start by saying that I have enjoyed most all of the films from this course so far, however this film left me with a bit if a different reaction than the others. While I enjoyed listening to Edward Said talk about his roots in Palestine and I fully agree with much of what he presented I found the structure of the film to be very difficult to follow, un-engaging, and generally difficult to understand and follow. I was left disappointed in many ways because I am interested in Said and his ideas but I just couldn't seem to get all that much clear information from the film and I ended up reading about Said and his theories later and feeling as though I got much more from that than the film itself.

I was very much intrigued with Said's description of Orientalism as "the idea that these people (Middle Eastern Peoples) do not change…they are still in time". I thought more about American representations of people from the Middle East and it really made sense. I thought about the Arab Spring and the images that we have seen from the rebellions, especially the revolution in Egypt and it really clicked in my mind why American’s have this representation of Arabs. The images and footage that we are provided with from this revolution make the Egyptian, Bahraini, Syrian (the list goes on and on) people seem as though they are savages. We see images of bottles being thrown, people being beaten, yelling, screaming, bombs, fires etc. and we are left with the thought that these people have no concept of what it means to be civilized. The interesting point that I am trying to make is that it is so incredibly progressive for these dominated groups to have the courage to get together and rebel and yet the images and discourses that American’s are provided with still tell the story that these people are “stagnant savages”. We do not see all of the amazing things that these people have done, we are not told the story of why these people are fighting or why we are seeing the images that we are seeing and so the images take on a different meaning and help to gloss over the stereotypes that American people have of Middle Eastern peoples.

Another point that I found interesting from Said was what he talked about in the section of the film titled “Orientalism and Palestine Question”. Because Said himself was Palestinian he took on a clear stance in the conflict (one of which I happen to strongly agree with) and he presented it in a positive way, with a possible solution. He talked about the importance of coming to agreement of “coexistence” which is so very important in this conflict because both of the peoples fighting for the land have experienced exile and devastation. He does not make it a question of “who gets what” but rather how the two groups can coexist and finally find peace.  As Said put it so profoundly, “Finding a peaceful, human, and just solution will require overcoming Orientalism and its ideas of difference as a threat that must be contained or destroyed”.  This is the case not only for Orientalism and the American representation of Arabs and Muslims but also for American representations of all groups who are different from themselves.

In general this film offered some very interesting commentary on Orientalism from Said but like I mentioned above I found it hard to follow—not exactly “user friendly”. However Said himself is an amazing theorist and someone that I would love to study more in the future.