That the Orient is a social construction, something completely man-made is really interesting to me, although not necessarily new. For me, what I’ve been thinking about lately is what Said references at the end when he cites Raymond Williams—that by recognizing that certain things are socially constructed, hopefully people can progress in the “unlearning†of “the inherent dominative mode†(28). I realize that we were only able to read the Intro from Orientalism, and that perhaps Said addresses this in the rest of his text, but how do y’all think we can “unlearn†the modes in which we were taught? I think it’s a good starting point to know that what we’ve been taught as objective is actually socially constructed, but what I struggle with personally is moving beyond this—how does one move past simple awareness and begin to see things from a new perspective if he/she has seen a certain subject from a specific view point for so long? How does one throw off the colonization of language?
Also, I’m not quite sure how to connect this thought with the previous thought, but I think the idea of intersectionality is really interesting—that one cannot talk about ethnicity without addressing gender and sexuality is something I find to be very true. What do y’all think of this and how do you think intersectionality affects how we read? Do people ever rank the importance/relevance of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, religion, ability or other examples of diversity when they are reading? How does our (mis)understanding of one of these aspects of identity affect how we understand a person as an individual? How does it affect our understanding of a group of people?
4 responses so far ↓
sprinkles // 2 November 2008 at 5.42 pm
I also found the concept of “unlearning” modes for being taught an interesting one. I took it to mean that one should try to ignore previous conceptions when being taught. I think that the author, Said, was advising, at least, an attempt at learning objectively. However, I find this to be very unrealistic because people have their perspective shaped by what the experience. This leads to a set of beliefs. These beliefs usually dictate perspective, so it’s nearly impossible to ignore preconceptions.
2southgreen // 3 November 2008 at 1.07 am
I think that humans need these kinds of modes of learning in order to function. If we were to be totally honest with ourselves, every country, region, county, city and town are unique, as is every individual human being. However, our minds can’t take in all that information… we absolutely have to form schemas and classify. Some distinctions are more justified by the evidence than others, but any kind of categorization is in some way unfair stereotyping. For example, I’m a woman… and… there is a great number of associations everyone has with what it means to be a member of that gender, no matter how open-minded we try to be. Otherwise, our language and our whole thought process would be meaningless.
My point is, while we may be able to “unlearn” some modes, we will only replace them with others, which may not be any better. I can’t imagine our not having a system like this; even if the categories are redistributed, there will still be categories.
sfbull5 // 3 November 2008 at 1.34 am
In the chapter “Racial Difference,” I really liked the idea of “textual unconscious” that B&R brought up. Probably that caught my eye in particular having just read Freud’s essay on the Uncanny, but I thought it was an interesting idea that a text can have both a physically present level and an unconscious level, as well.
I also liked B&R’s descriptions of racial otherness (or any other kind of otherness) being reliant on some amount of simultaneous racial ’sameness,’ so that there is something that the other is NOT.
zzzzz // 3 November 2008 at 3.52 pm
I totally agree that these classifications are things that we cannot possibly eradicate merely because we would never be able to process the individuality of everyone. As some people said in class, it’s just too much information. We take what we see and we generalize it because that’s the only way we know how to hold all of the conceptions of differences among people.
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