So, I'm going to split this up. One, the last lecture was really long and there was a lot of ideas in it, so I'm going to try to be a bit more concise and let the text do the talking for me, the videos do the talking for me. So, I'll break these up and most of them will have one clip with each thing that I can comment on or not, it depends. So, all of this problem of voices that we've been talking about really every week is persisting here, it comes to the fore here. And so these are the different arguments that have been articulated over and over again.
A lot of this stuff that I bring in, that's my extra stuff, this week comes from the Yes We Can reading. It was just about all of these questions that are being posed. So these are people who are experiencing the Western canon and saying these questions that come from that. And so the idea here is that you get caught in that trap if you make the claim.
that is legible to a Western audience, you don't sound non-Western. And if you make a claim that is not legible to the Western audience, then it's non-Western. And so it can never kind of be both, right, at the same time. And so this idea of, you know, devaluing certain people by dismissing, well, not even intentionally, by highlighting European philosophy, produces this kind of, this enacting of what are legitimate actors, even the idea of non-Western. is already kind of gross, right?
It's kind of saying that, well, it's not Western, so we'll just lump it into this category of something else. And so if racism is a classification system, it's an epistemic mover. It's not real.
It's just something we do, that we impose on things that are scientific in order to say they're valid or not. And so, you know, it's just this way that we can do thinking differently. And so a lot of this in particular because he was a very influential scholar is Saeed is what he does in orientalism which I think we produced in 78 was this idea that there are stereotypes about the orient the non-west that are produced in the occident which is the west and that the two of them are mutually co-constituted that you can't think about what it means to be Western without thinking about its distinguishment from the non-Western world. And so these stereotypes then are reproduced over and over and over again, particularly if we're talking about Middle Eastern stereotypes, the Islamophobia that's been inherent in it for as long as the West has kind of thought about itself as distinct is kind of built into that. Said in particular takes on Huntington's Clash of Civilizations as being just the kind of the most popular form of this orientalist thinking that just takes over how we think about conflict in the world and it becomes a darling of foreign policy and all the rest of it and so this idea of portraying everybody who's not western as irrational or violence or inferior despotic or passive is why i keep saying that liberalism has no endogenous theory of violence right in the tradition of the west which has been incredibly violent and we justify those violence all the time in terms of you know the structures and institutions in 1648 and the peace and all the rest of it as necessary but at the same time has no theory of it because it always says it's liberalism claims it's all of these other categories that are producing the violence right and so the occident is constantly defining itself well we're not violent they're violent right even while it engages in violence in order to get rid of that violence in the world right so This idea, we'll come to it later, but democratic peace theory that democracies don't go to war with each other.
Not only is it not factually true, democracies go to war all the time with non-democracies and always blame the non-democracies. No, listen, some of it's justified, some of it's not. But it's the idea that violence is always on the outside. It's never internal, right?
So here's a bit of Saeed just talking about Orientalism. So what does Orientalism say? Oh. Is this Saeed? It might not be Saeed.
This might be another video. Maybe I'll... Saeed's book, Orientalism, is a critique. Okay, so now this is just repeating what I said.
I thought I had a clip of Saeed. I can find a clip of Saeed and stick him in later. Actually, I'll just put it in the playlist....of modern European colonialism. The book argues that colonialism was not only a system of political rule, but also was an all-around worldview that simply believed the West was superior.
to the east. Saeed examined scholarly debates about Near Eastern cultures, especially those that were mainly Muslim. He then challenged common Western assumptions about these colonized societies.
Because he was looking at academic debates, Said's work in Orientalism was designed to show that the academic world was closely connected to the system of political power. Said was seeking to prove that academics had, in effect, collaborated in the West's domination. So that's the key premise of having...
This chapter called Non-Western, look at all the power we have in deciding which ideas count, which ones are considered and which ones aren't. Of the East, Said argued that European colonialism was really about taking advantage of colonized people's labor and their resources, while at the same time claiming that the Western colonial power was a savior, helping these societies to become more modern. like Europe.
This was easier for the colonial power to do because it consistently categorized the Orient through the use of degrading stereotypes. This was Said's main argument. Said wrote that this colonialist thinking did not go away when colonial rule ended in the early 20th century, but that it continued in different forms.
Now this was made easier when the United States emerged as a huge global power. and according to Said, showed a clearly Orientalist view of the world. Said wanted academics and society to admit that racist, colonialist ideas had been supported by Western academic thinking, and that the one depended on the other.
His ideas were controversial for sure, but there is no doubt that these ideas have helped to change the way colonialism is understood now. So why does Orientalism matter? Orientalism is a very important book that has had a wide influence both in the university and in politics. It is a key text in post-colonial studies and was considered revolutionary when it first appeared in 1978. Said showed how academic writing can be deeply connected to the politics and workings of colonialism.
and how the one fed the other in order to justify the West's self-imposed status as a superior culture. According to Said, colonialism wasn't just the act of colonizing a particular place. It was an all-encompassing way of understanding the world. All right, so that's enough of that. What I'll do then is, in the next video, I'll just bring in one of Said talking for himself.
That was just a summary. But that's a good, clear, coherent summary.