Authority
One of the premises for his discussion of the nature of Orientalism which the author establishes in his Introduction is the essential quality of intellectual authority. This intellectual authority has a history which traces back in time to the division of European and Eastern culture. He then goes on to invest the meaning of authority with metaphorical implication:
“There is nothing mysterious or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated, disseminated; it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status, it establishes canons of taste and value; it is virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true, and from traditions, perceptions, and judgments it forms, transmits, reproduces.”
That’s Some Job, Whatever It Is
The job of the Orientalist is not an easy one. It is part paleontologist, part historian and part anthropologist. Put all those things together and what one arrives at is, metaphorically speaking, an artist:
“It remains the professional Orientalist's job to piece together a portrait, a restored picture as it were, of the Orient or the Oriental.”
A Changing World
A potent political issue in the 2020 election was how each of the two Presidential candidates would “handle” China. Meaning, of course, how they would treat the fact that China is one of the most powerful countries on the planet. Times change even if metaphors do not:
“Asia represented, then, the unpleasant likelihood of a sudden eruption that would destroy “our” world; as John Buchan put it in 1922…Have you ever reflected on the case of China? There you have millions of quick brains stifled in trumpery crafts. They have no direction, no driving power, so the sum of their efforts is futile, and the world laughs at China.”
An Unchanging World
Then again, there are those circumstances in which neither times nor the metaphors change all that much. The view toward the populace making up the “Orient” is one situated in terms of metaphor which even as Said wrote them was ancient and which have changed little if at all since:
“Arabs, for example, are thought of as camel-riding, terroristic, hook-nosed, venal lechers whose undeserved wealth is an affront to real civilization. Always there lurks the assumption that although the Western consumer belongs to a numerical minority, he is entitled either to own or to expend (or both) the majority of the world resources. Why? Because he, unlike the Oriental, is a true human being.”
The Bureaucracy of Imperialist Supremacy
The author posits a fascinating fact about how utilitarian British bureaucratic regulation contributed to sustaining imperial supremacy. Whether there is any actual merit in the supposition is best confirmed by research, but there is no denying that it is an intriguing notion. To fully grasp the metaphor requires understanding that “Raj” is synonymous with a strapping, robust authoritarian presence of domination:
“When it became common practice during the nineteenth century for Britain to retire its administrators from India and elsewhere once they had reached the age of fifty-five, then a further refinement in Orientalism had been achieved; no Oriental was ever allowed see a Westerner as he aged and degenerated, just as no Westerner needed ever to see himself, mirrored in the eyes of the subject race, as anything but a vigorous, rational, ever-alert young Raj.”
