Why does Said insist that the Orient is not merely imaginative?
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Said insists that the Orient is not merely imaginative as it is precisely its material culture and civilization that allows for the idea of the Occident to exist. Although the Levant and India represented “the Biblical texts and the Biblical lands [and] the spice trade” (Said 4) in the white imagination, the West has historically used “Oriental backwardness” (Said 7) as a premise for European superiority. “The relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony” (Said 5), and Western institutions have molded the academic study of Orientalism and popular conceptions of the East to feed and exacerbate this unbalanced relationship. Despite the continued use of this form of quasi-propaganda to uphold the hegemony, leveraging the “imaginative” Orient has had very real impacts on Americans of color. Edward Said expresses that “the life of an Arab Palestinian is the West, particularly in America, is disheartening” (Said 27) and that studying Orientalism “has been an attempt to inventory the traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals” (Said 25). Even in the modern era of technology where knowledge is readily available, Western media “has been a reinforcement of the stereotypes by which the Orient is viewed” (Said 26).
Still, 19th century Bengali peddlers in America were able to appropriate a tool established for their subjugation to navigate the harsh realities of Jim Crow south. Bald writes of how their “replication of the servility of the imagined colonial subject” (Bald 51) and their “politeness, servility, and self-exoticizing airs did a particular kind of work” (Bald 52). Despite laws segregating transportation, their affective Oriental performance allowed them to move and provided them with greater mobile and thus economic safety.
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As Said points out in his book, Orientalism can be generalising (as @jane_malek and @pierre-augustin_habrih have also pointed out), but there are also specific Orientalist stereotypes, the British stereotype of the weak and servile Bengali being one of these.