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薩伊德《東方類別說》簡介 ---- Noah Christiansen
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下文對薩伊德的《東方類別說》主旨有簡要說明；「東方類別說」通譯為「東方主義」。
Edward Said’s “Orientalism”
Examining the role of knowledge, power, and discourse in constructing the hierarchy between the West and the East
Noah Christiansen, 02/22/26
Edward Said (1935–2003) was a Palestinian-American literary theorist and public intellectual whose work fundamentally shaped the field of postcolonial studies — the interdisciplinary study of how colonialism, imperialism, and racial hierarchy structure global politics and culture. In Orientalism (1978), Said introduced a concept for understanding how Western societies construct “the East” as a singular, knowable, and inferior category. Orientalism, for Said, is not merely a set of stereotypes; it is a system of thought that produces the East as categorically different while positioning the West as rational, liberal, and authoritative.
This framing is deeply ironic and reminds me of what my former student once wrote about on the subject. Western societies often condemn the East as underdeveloped or morally deficient — pointing to exploitative child labor — while simultaneously benefiting from the very economic systems that produce those conditions. The East is demonized, yet its labor is outsourced and monetized.
Orientalism remains essential because it exposes the epistemological split through which the West places itself at the top of a global hierarchy — not only through military or economic power, but through the authority to define and categorize. I will be using quotes from Orientalism (Penguin Books), particularly the section “Knowing the Oriental,” which is among the most frequently assigned and discussed portion of the text.
The Declaration of Empire
Said beings Orientalism by examining the logic through which empires justify themselves:
On June 13, 1910, Arthur James Balfour lectured the House of Commons on “the problems with which we have to deal in Egypt.”
These, he said, “belong to a wholly different category” than those “affecting the Isle of Wight or the West Riding of Yorkshire.”
Said begins by introducing Arthur James Balfour (1848–1930), a British statesman and former Prime Minister, as he addresses Parliament to justify Britain’s occupation of Egypt. In his speech, Balfour insists that Egypt “belongs to a wholly different category” than Western society. Said starts here because this speech reveals more than a defense of empire; it exposes an epistemic division. The distinction between Western society and Egypt is not merely geographical. It is a division in how civilization is understood. Egypt is constructed not simply as elsewhere, but as fundamentally different — and therefore subject to a specific kind of domination.
However, Balfour was met with resistance:
Recalling the challenge o f J. M. Robertson, the member of Tyneside, Balfour himself put Robertson’s question again: “What right have you to take up these airs of superiority with regard to people whom you choose to call Oriental?”
John Mackinnon Robertson (1856–1933), a Liberal Member of Parliament, challenges Balfour by asking what right he has to claim superiority over those he labels “Oriental.” Before presenting Balfour’s response, Said pauses to examine the term “Oriental”:
The choice of “Oriental” was canonical; it had been employed by Chaucer and Mandeville, by Shakespeare, Dryden, Pope, and Byron.
It designated Asia or the East, geographically, morally, culturally.
The term “Oriental,” as used by Balfour, functions as a sweeping generalization — a way of collapsing the East into a vague “over there,” encompassing everything from geography to culture. With this homogenizing rhetoric already in place, it comes as no surprise that Balfour responds to Robertson in a manner that reinforces Western authority.
Balfour states:
We know the civilization of Egypt better than we know the civilization of any other country.
We know it further back; we know it more intimately; we know more about it.
For Balfour to claim that he “knows” the civilization of Egypt is to position Egypt as an object of study — something that can be fully grasped. In doing so, Egypt is transformed into a spectacle, defined by certain images and arbitrary representations. This is the core of Said’s criticism: the effort to “know” the East produces the category of the “Oriental.” And this logic extends beyond Egypt. As Figure Two and Figure Three illustrate, India and China are depicted as homogeneous spectacles and absorbed into a single, curated image of “the East.”
Said continues by analyzing what it means to “know” the East:
Two great themes dominate his remarks here and in what will follow: knowledge and power … The object of such knowledge is inherently vulnerable to scrutiny; this object is a “fact” which, if it develops, changes, or otherwise transforms itself in the way that civilizations frequently do, nevertheless is fundamentally, even ontologically stable.
To have such knowledge of such a thing is to dominate it, to have authority over it.
And authority here means for “us” to deny autonomy to “it” — the Oriental country since we know it and it exists, in a sense, as we know it.
Said identifies two fundamental themes at work in Balfour’s speech: knowledge and power. To “know” Egypt is not simply to understand it; it is to render it stable, classifiable, and intelligible from a distance. Egypt becomes an object of study — something like a machine whose mechanics can be studied. But this act of knowing is inseparable from authority. If a civilization can be fully grasped, surveyed from origin to decline, then it can also be managed.
Ironically, the East is treated as already structured in advance; any deviation can simply be absorbed back into the established framework. Once the East is defined as a stable category, knowledge does not merely describe it — it organizes it. And that organization carries a power relation in which the West assumes the authority to dominate.
Said continues by citing Balfour:
We are in Egypt not merely for the sake of the Egyptians, though we are there for their sake; we are there also for the sake of Europe at large.
Notably, Balfour’s claim performs two important functions. First, it frames British intervention as benevolent — a civilizing mission undertaken for the sake of the Egyptian people. For Balfour, Egyptians require guidance from the British Empire. Yet this humanitarian rhetoric is not Balfour’s central concern. Balfour invokes the protection of Europe itself, expressing a kind of anxiety regarding Egyptian customs spilling beyond their borders and destabilizing Western civilization.
To this, Said highlights the erroneous nature of this framework:
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.
The division between a rational West and an irrational “Oriental” presupposes a violent hierarchy. Once the West casts itself as rational and the East as irrational, domination appears as a necessity. This hierarchy materializes in concrete forms—land grabbing, territorial occupation, military intervention, and the disposal of unworthy bodies.
Said continues:
Once again, knowledge of subject races or Orientals is what makes their management easy and profitable; knowledge gives power, more power requires more knowledge, and so on in an increasingly profitable dialectic of information and control.
Once again, Said returns to the relationship between knowledge and power. To “know” the Oriental is to render them manageable — to stabilize them as an object that can be governed. Knowledge supplies power with its legitimacy, but power continuously requires more knowledge. There is never enough knowing about the East, because knowledge is not pursued for understanding alone; it is always in relation to control. He writes:
…Orientalism can also express the strength of the West and the Orient’s weakness — as seen by the West.
Such strength and such weakness are as intrinsic to Orientalism as they are to any view that divides the world into large general divisions, entities that coexist in a state of tension produced by what is believed to be radical difference.
Here, Said argues that Orientalism does more than describe differences between the West and the East; it structures the international order into unequal halves, enabling one side to claim superiority over the other. Within this framework, the West is cast as strong and authoritative, while the Orient is rendered weak and in need of management. While all of this seems obvious given the previous analysis, it is worth reiterating: the dichotomy between the West and East is violent. And, it has real, material implications:
On the one hand there are Westerners, and on the other there are Arab-Orientals; the former are (in no particular order) rational, peaceful, liberal, logical, capable of holding real values, without natural suspicion; the latter are none of these things.
Thus, the division is not merely descriptive but structural. The West is defined as rational and peaceful while the East is categorized as irrational and in need of supervision. This binary has everlasting implications if the knowledge/power relation goes unexamined. Ultimately, once this hierarchy is established, domination is not only justified, but deemed necessary. Is there a way out?
Conclusion
Said’s Orientalism remains an essential text not simply because it inaugurated postcolonial studies, but because it altered how we understand power. The division between West and East is not natural, nor inevitable — it is produced through discourse. Contemporary rhetoric surrounding immigration, disease (i.e., the ‘China Virus’ during COVID), labor, etc. highlights the relevance of Said’s work. Before land is occupied, an epistemological division is structured. Thus, Said exposes this division as erroneously constructed, arguing that dismantling it is a necessary first step in confronting the material realities of colonialism.
Written by Noah Christiansen
www.noahchristiansen.com
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「中東」名稱的由來 - Roshni Chakrabarty
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Why is it called the Middle East? Middle of what, and East of where?
The phrase 'Middle East' sounds neutral, but it was born from the British empire. Coined by Western strategists looking out from London, it placed Europe at the centre of the world and labelled everything else by distance. Here's how the term began, and why it remains debated today.
The phrase ‘Middle East’ sounds neutral, but it was born from the British empire. (Photo shows European 20th denotion of Middle East, Near East and Far East regions) 世界地圖照片
Roshni Chakrabarty, India Today Education Desk, 03/03/26
The words roll off the tongue so easily: Middle East. We hear them in news bulletins, textbooks, airport announcements. But pause for a second. Middle of what? And east of where?
The answer takes us back to a time when the world map was drawn not just with ink, but with power.
The phrase is widely believed to have been first used in 1902 by American naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan. Writing about British imperial interests, he described the lands between India and the Persian Gulf as the “Middle East”. His mental compass pointed firmly from Europe.
The “middle” sat between the so-called Near East and the Far East. Near meant the Balkans (巴爾幹半島) and Ottoman territories (土耳其). Far meant China and Japan. Everything was measured from London.
In that worldview, Europe was the centre. Distance from Europe defined identity.
A MAP DRAWN FROM LONDON
As the British Empire expanded, it needed language to organise its vast territories. Territories such as Egypt were grouped into the “Middle East” because they lay east of London but not as far as Asia’s eastern edge.
Meanwhile, British India, much farther from London, was often described as part of the “Far East”, a label that simply meant farther east from Europe’s imperial centre. These weren’t neutral labels. They were directional tags based on imperial routes and naval strategy.
Later, British and American officials adopted the term more widely. It proved useful, especially in diplomacy and military planning. After the First World War and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, new states emerged across the region.
The label “Middle East” began to stick, even though its borders were never clearly agreed upon. Does it include Iran? Turkey? North Africa? Ask ten people and you may get ten answers.
That ambiguity remains today.
中東地圖
MORE THAN A GEOGRAPHICAL WORD
Over time, the phrase gathered baggage. It became shorthand in global media, often linked to conflict, oil, war or instability.
Yet the lands grouped under that single term stretch from the Mediterranean to the Gulf, from ancient Persian civilisations to Arab heartlands. Languages, religions and histories vary widely.
Critics argue that the name flattens this diversity into one block on a map.
The same logic that created “Middle East” also gave us “Near East” and “Far East”. Each term placed Europe at the centre and described others by their distance from it.
You would never hear someone in London say they are travelling to the “Middle West” when flying to Europe’s west. The humour lies in the reversal.
The normality of “Middle East” shows how deeply the language has settled in.
Check out this video of Egyptian writer and activist Nawal El Saadawi schooling a woman on the colonial origins of 'Middle East' (Source: Youtube/@whoisprakasaka): 視頻(解釋「中東」一詞的來源)
WHAT DO PEOPLE SAY INSTEAD?
In academic and political circles, alternatives such as “West Asia” or “North Africa” are sometimes preferred. These terms describe geography without placing Europe at the middle of the story. They attempt to shift the lens.
Still, “Middle East” remains dominant. It is embedded in diplomacy, journalism and public conversation. Changing it would mean rethinking more than a label. It would mean questioning who gets to name regions of the world.
So the next time the phrase appears on your screen, remember this: it is not a natural direction like north or south. It is a product of history, born from empire and strategy. The “middle” exists only if Europe is your starting point.
And that small detail changes the way the map looks.
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