Day Nineteen: Orientalism
My recommended listening to accompany the text below is a scene from Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida. This recording is from La Scala in 2006, conducted by Ricardo Chailly.
Edward Said, born in 1935, was a Palestinian/American intellectual who was one of the most important cultural critics of the twentieth century. He pioneered the study of how empires functioned, how a group of countries developed under the rule of one state, to the extent that he is widely considered to have founded the area of study called post-colonial theory. This area of study tried to understand why countries developed in the way they did in a post-colonial era. With Said being born in the British Mandate of Palestine, growing up in Jerusalem, moving to Cairo, his position as an intellectual in exile in the US really set him apart from his colleagues and gave him a unique insight into the relationship between the occident and the orient, himself having a foot in both worlds with his education at Harvard, Princeton and Columbia Universities.
Edward Said published two books, “Orientalism” and “Culture and Imperialism” in which he discusses the friction between the occident and the orient and puts forward a critique of the depiction of the Eastern World by Western Art. He called this Orientalism, the idea that colonialism was not only a system of political rule, but a world view that considered the West superior to the East.
Said argues that the literature of both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries not only aided but was also responsible, in part, for the justification that the West used to dominate the rest of the world. It was during this Romantic period in literature and music that many individuals started to travel more, visiting places further away and bringing back their stories in an elaborate manner in order to impress their comrades back home. As a result, many of the depictions of the “Orient” were extremely exotic, erotic and aroused a fascination with all things foreign. These stories and views of “the other” created a literary environment that was the ideal melting pot for colonialist and expansionist ideas. If the “other” was depicted as an uncivilised, exotic creature, then it was much easier to justify ones domination over them.
One of the main arguments of European colonialism was that the West were the “saviours” of the colonised people, helping them to become modern when in fact, the reality of the situation was a grotesque exploitation of labour and resources. This, however, was made easier for the West because of their systematic categorisation of the Orient through degrading stereotypes. Said puts forward the notion that this colonial way of thinking did not go away when colonial rule ended, rather it continued to exist in different forms. According to Said, colonialism was not just the act of colonising a place, it was an all-encompassing way of understanding the world.
Looking at it from today’s perspective, Orientalism is found in all forms of media. In cinema, films such as Indiana Jones and Aladdin are prime examples of how the reality of a place is stretched to the point of ridicule but because of their place in society (i.e, the fact that these films are famous worldwide and marketed accordingly), one starts to take them at face value and use it as their reference point when thinking of “the other”. In these films, the “hero” is always from the Western World, the villain being from the East. Taking it even further, you have the overly sexualised character of Princess Jasmine in Aladdin, who is the film version of the art at the time whereby women were represented as erotic, sexualised fantasies. Examples such as these go to show how powerful discourse is in influencing society and how it can be used as a weapon of power.
On this, Said was greatly inspired by the French philosopher Michel Foucault and his concept of discourse. Essentially, Foucault put forward the idea that the way in which we talk about subjects, the discourse around a subject, greatly influences the way we perceive the reality of that subject. Therefore, this would suggest that the discourse also has the power to determine right or wrong and is actually representative of a higher power structure. In the case of the Orient, it was the West that was writing, painting and talking about the East and not the other way around. As a result, the West had the power to create their own version of reality to help them with whatever cause they saw fit. The argument for Said is that the power of literature, of music and of discussion was so great that it was directly responsible for the imperialist nature of the West towards the East.
Even though colonialism in its “original” form is over, Said argues that the systems of thought which formed the foundations are still in place today. This can be seen with regards to the portrayal of certain cultures or ethnic minorities in the modern media. An obvious contemporary example would be the difference between how the world and media views a white supremacist and a Muslim who commit the same crime (for the sake of argument, let's use the unfortunately too common example of a shooting ). If a white supremacist was to commit the crime of a mass shooting, then it is often seen as the problem of society, of mental illness or of individual trauma that caused him to act in this way. On the other hand, if a Muslim were to commit the same crime, there is a direct jump to the label of terrorist extremist without the consideration of the factors that are given to the white man. This is, to the most part, a result of the fact that if one looks at Hollywood in the last fifteen years, there are hundreds of films which every single man, woman and child watches, which depict Muslims as terrorists who wear rags and live in the desert. This is Orientalism. When the discourse is so strongly bias that it can change the foundations of logical thought and reason in a society, then it is absolutely right to consider it a powerful weapon.
Said’s definition of culture was very broad. He defined it not only as something that has autonomy from the economic, social and political realms but also that it can stand for an identity. It was in this way that Orientalist ideas spread into music.
Perhaps one of the strongest examples of this is Verdi’s opera, Aida. Verdi himself had never visited Egypt, had no connection with the country and was even quoted as saying “it was a civilisation I had never been able to admire”. Yet, as one of the leading figures in Western Classical music at the time, he was deemed an authority enough that he could write such an opera. The commission came from the viceroy of Egypt, Ismail, who wanted an opera by one of Europe’s foremost composers for his new opera house in Cairo. Verdi’s opera was intended to form part of the cultural superstructure of the European presence in Egypt, purchased as a way to entertain the European people living in Egypt. Liberated from the shackles of European opera houses, Verdi was totally free to write and create a piece of art as he liked.
Through Aida, Verdi portrayed a vision of Egypt that was seen through the tinted lens of European colonialist ideology. Indeed, his commissioner, Ismail, said in 1879: “My country is no longer in Africa; we are now part of Europe. It is therefore natural for us to abandon our former ways and to adopt a new system adapted to our social conditions.” Instead of writing an opera that was respectful and contemporary, the plot is very much a glorification of a stereotypical Orient of the past that fuels the idea of the uncivilised, exotic, non-white world. The opera is an allegory of colonialism. With the issues put forward by Said very much still a pressing issue in today’s society, what responsibilities do opera houses, museums and other cultural institutions have towards the way in which they present art from the past in the present? I will leave this an open question, suggesting that perhaps there is a need for more sensitivity to the production of opera in the twenty first century than can be seen in the suggested recording.
