Richard Bernstein's obituary of Edward W. Said mentions his Orientalism, and

its theory that the Orient and especially the Arab world have been created by the Western imagination as a series of demeaning, reductive stereotypes.

"Orientalism" established Dr. Said as a figure of enormous influence in American and European universities, a hero to many, especially younger faculty and graduate students on the left for whom that book became an intellectual credo and the founding document of what came to be called postcolonial studies. Central to Dr. Said's argument was the notion that there was no objective, neutral scholarship on Asia and especially on the Arab world. The very Western study of the East, in his view, was bound up in the systematic prejudices about the non-Western world that turned it into a set of cliches. Since the enlightenment, Dr. Said wrote, "every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric."

This view did not go unchallenged, even among specialists on the Middle East who found many of his points valid but who rejected numerous assertions as overdrawn, hyperbolic and oversimplistic.

"It is a pity that it is so pretentiously written, so drenched in jargon, for there is much in this book that is superb as well as intellectually exciting," wrote the British historian J. H. Plumb in The Times. But Plumb and others contended that Dr. Said made no effort to actually examine the real, historical relations between West and East, or "to sort out what was true in the Western representation" of the East from what was false and caricatured.

They argued that Dr. Said's assumption was that the Orientalists simply invented the East to satisfy the requirements of cultural superiority and Western imperialism and that he ignored the vast body of scholarship that grappled with the East on its own terms.

Scholars shouldn't let their prejudices overwhelm them--but that's not what he was saying. Like the postmodernists who inspired him, he insists that objectivity is impossible.

Moreover, there's another problem. In American English, "oriental" as a noun suggests "an Asian". (Although thanks in no small part to Said, I believe, "oriental" as a noun sounds outdated or even offensive.) "Oriental" as an adjective means "Of or designating the biogeographic region that includes Asia south of the Himalaya Mountains and the islands of the Malay Archipelago." The Orient is "The countries of Asia, especially of eastern Asia."

What I found extremely annoying about the book was that for him, "the Orient" nevertheless meant the Middle East. There's practically nothing in his book about eastern or southeast Asia. Talk about a huge blind spot. So does that mean he's right? That objectivity is impossible? Great! I don't have to believe a word he wrote.


Update

Keith Windschuttle had something on Edward Said's Orientalism at The New Criterion.

Here's a little more evidence of what I dislike about Edward Said and his ilk: in My Encounter with Sartre, dated 1 June 2000, he praises Sartre for a number of things including Sartre's "gutsy appearance as a Maoist radical during the 1968 student demonstrations in Paris". Apparently being a Maoist radical is still something good.

Part of my dislike of Said is not so much for what he wrote, but for the postmodernist/postcolonialist claptrap he and people like Foucault helped inspire. First of all, I cannot accept the Marxist assumptions that the theorists insist on. Postmodernism is supposed to be emblematic of the late stage of capitalism; that means the postmodernists believe that capitalism is coming to an end, right? As far as I can see, the only reason they know that is because Marx told them so. Second, and far worse, is the assumption that objectivity is impossible, that one's ideas about reality are all based on identity, and that's identity, pretty much restricted to race, gender, and culture. And finally, and worst of all, is the incomprehensible language these people use.