Analysing Aijaz Ahmad's essay 'ORIENTALISM AND AFTER: AMBIVALENCE AND METROPOLITAN LOCATION IN THE WORK OF EDWARD SAID'

Portraying the prejudice of the western scholars, Edward Said’s ‘ORIENTALISM’ challenges those who deliberately write in stereotyped ways about the ‘East’ in order to construct an imaginary ‘Other’. According to Said, it was the widely drawn distinction between ‘rational West’ and ‘irrational East’ that paved the way for the dominance of the U.S. over the Arab world in the post-war period. Apart from generating wide-spread interest, Said’s views on Orientalism also gave rise to vehement criticism from various fronts.

In the opinion of Aijaz Ahmad, many of Said's theoretical and political problems arise from his determination to uphold the absolutely contradictory traditions, which Ahmad refers as 'Auerbachian High Humanism'. He considers ‘ORIENTALISM’ to be a “deeply flawed book”, since Said is mum about the ideas of colonialism and post-colonialism there.

Aijaz Ahmad in his essay ‘ORIENTALISM AND AFTER: AMBIVALENCE AND METROPOLITAN LOCATION IN THE WORK OF EDWARD SAID’ states that the particular texture of Orientalism, its "will to portray a West which has been same from the dawn of history to the present and its will to traverse all the main languages of Europe", derives from the ambition to write a counter-history that could be posed against Auerbach's MIMESIS, a magisterial account of the seamless genesis of European realism and rationalism from the Greek antiquity to the modernist movement. Ahmad suggests that class, gender, ethnicity and religion had been at work in every society, both European and non-European. But what gave European forms of prejudice their special force in history was not 'some trans-historical process of ontological obsession and falsity', but the 'power of colonial capitalism' which then gave rise to other sort of powers.

According to Ahmad, throughout ORIENTALISM, Said fails to decide whether he considers orientalism to be merely a product of a system of representations, in the post-modernist sense attached to it by Derrida and Foucault, or a system of mis-representation, wilfully produced by the West.

Said mentioned 2 Greek playwrights in the context of defining the qualities of the Orient. They are Aeschylus' THE PERSIANS and Euripides' THE BACCHAE. To quote Said,

"A line is drawn between two continents; Europe is powerful and articulate, Asia is defeated and distant..." It is Europe that articulates the Orient.

Said talked about eighteenth century as the starting point of Orientalism, as a construct; but Ahmad asks, " If there really is only this seamless and incremental history of orientalist discourse from Aeschylus to Dante to Marx to Bernard Lewis, then in what sense would one take 18th century as the roughly defined starting point?"  The West rather needed to constitute the Orient as Other, to make an Identity-through-Difference. The Third World takes birth in the natural course: a product of "identity through difference". As an Other it can try to emulate the superior, but will never succeed. This Third World might produce Third World literature which would be treated as marginal, non-canonical texts counterposed against Europe. The third world literature is a broad term having no boundaries of class, caste, time or culture.

In an essay entitled THIRD WORLD INTELLECTUALS AND METROPOLITAN CULTURE, Said recommends that non-western writers be seriously taken by the western readers. But the main argument rests on a rather strange distinction between the colonial or post-colonial intellectuals. Aijaz Ahmad protests against Said's generalised view that " Resistance to imperialism does not, of course, only involve armed force or band of guerillas. It is mainly allied with nationalism and with an aroused sense of aggrieved religious, cultural or existential identity..." Said says in its pantheon are renowned prophets and priests like Gandhi and a phallanx of nationalist writers like Tagore,  W.B. Yeats, Pablo Neruda as well as other renowned figures. But Ahmad argues, "Gandhi's appearance here in the category of prophets and priests is odd."

In the essay SECULAR CRITICISM, Said made a comment which later became the introduction to his book 'THE WORLD, THE TEXT AND THE CRITIC'. He wrote, "I am an undeclared Marxist afraid of losing respectability..."

According to Said, the net effect of 'doing' Marxist criticism or writing at the present time is, of course, to declare the political preference and to put oneself outside a great deal of things going outside the world, so to speak, in other kinds of criticism. Ahmad concludes this essay by refuting the aforesaid view of Said, "Said's warning which is also a self-warning – that a choice for Marxism entails putting outside a great deal of things, points towards a possible inventory of renunciation". Ahmad says that it is a pity that Said never takes stock of what "Marxism might have made possible nor what one actually loses when one puts oneself inside too many things".

Ahmad says that having access to a great deal of things always gives one "a sense of opulence, mastery, reach, choice, freedom..." But he says that resolution of the kind of "ambivalences and self-cancelling procedures which beset Said's thought require that same positions be vacated, some choices be made, some of these great deal of things be renounced".

Thus the argument of Said's view on orientalism is not an eternal order, but a peculiar predicament where one questions, can one really hope for a de-orientalisation of discourses and world order?