BLF / Orientalism

November 1, 1935September 25, 2003

Edward W. Said

Edward W. Said

Edward W. Said

Edward W. Said

AnaLouise Keating: “Autohistoria teoria is a theory developed by Anzaldua to describe a relational form of autobiographical writing that includes both life story and self-reflection on this storytelling process.”

“Much of the personal investment in this study derives from my awareness of being an "Oriental" as a child growing up in two British colonies. All of my education, in those colonies (Palestine and Egypt) and in the United States, has been Western, and yet that deep early awareness has persisted. In many ways my study of Orientalism has been an attempt to inventory the traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals.” (Orientalism-p.25)

autohistoria teoria

Orientalism

“For Orientalism was ultimately a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, "us") and the strange (the Orient, the East, "them"). This vision in a sense created and then served the two worlds thus conceived. Orientals lived in their world, "we" lived in ours.” (Orientalism-p.43)

“There are Westerners, and there are Orientals. The former dominate; the latter must be dominated, which usually means having their land occupied, their internal affairs rigidly controlled, their blood and treasure put at the disposal of one or another Western power.”(Orientalism-p.36)

Concept of othering

borderlandla frontera

"Gringos in the U.S. Southwest consider the inhabitants of the borderlands transgressors, aliens- whether they possess documents or not, whether they're Chicanos, Indians or Blacks. Do not enter, trespassers will be raped, maimed, strangled, gassed, shot. The only "legitimate" inhabitants are those in power, the whites and those who align themselves with whites.” (Borderland / La Frontera-p.25)

Concept of othering

Orientalism

Orientalism

“The boundary notion of East and West, the varying degrees of projected inferiority and strength, the range of work done, the kinds of characteristic features ascribed to the Orient: all these testify to a willed imaginative and geographic division made between East and West, and lived through during many centuries.” (Orientalism-p.201)

Concept of othering

Orientalism

Orientalism

“A group of people living on a few acres of land will set up boundaries between their land and its immediate surroundings and the territory beyond (...). In other words, this universal practice of designating in one's mind a familiar space which is "ours" and an unfamiliar space beyond "ours" which is "theirs" is a way of making geographical distinctions that can be entirely arbitrary. I use the word "arbitrary" here because imaginative geography of the "our land—barbarian land" variety does not require that the barbarians acknowledge the distinction. It is enough for "us" to set up these boundaries in our own minds; "they" become "they" accordingly, and both their territory and their mentality are designated as different from "ours."” (Orientalism-p.54)

Concept of othering

Orientalism

borderlandla frontera

“Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary.” (Borderland / La Frontera-p.25)

Concept of othering

Orientalism

“But like any set of durable ideas, Orientalist notions influenced the people who were called Orientals as well as those called Occidental, European, or Western; in short, 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.”(Orientalism-p.42)

Concept of othering

Orientalism

Orientalism

“As for the Semites, whose language was agglutinative, unaesthetic, and mechanical, they were different, inferior, backward. Schlegel's lectures on language and on life, history, and literature are full of these discriminations, which he made without the slightest qualification.” (Orientalism-p.98)

Concept of othering

borderlandla frontera

“No, it isn’t enough that she is female-a second-class member of a conquered people who are taught to believe they are inferior because they have indigenous blood, believe in the supernatural and speak a deficient language. (...) But that means being Mexican. All her life she's been told that Mexicans are lazy. She has had to work twice as hard as others to meet the standards of the dominant culture which have, in part, become her standards.” (Borderland / La Frontera-p.70)

Concept of othering

“Woman is the stranger, the other.” (Borderland / La Frontera-p.39)

borderlandla frontera

“Alienated from her mother culture, " alien" in the dominant culture, the woman of color does not feel safe within the inner life of her Self. Petrified, she can't respond, her face caught between los intersticios, the spaces between the different worlds she inhabits.” (Borderland / La Frontera-p.42)

Concept of othering

borderlandla frontera

“They called her half and half, mita' y mita ', neither one nor the other but a strange doubling, a deviation of nature that horrified, a work of nature inverted” (Borderland / La Frontera-p.42)

Concept of othering

THANK YOU!¡GRACIAS!