Enframing, Said and Impressions

            As you know, the bulk of the last two class periods have revolved around Mitchell’s book, Colonising Egypt and his concept of enframing. Enframing, being the means by which colonizers created info and set up a rigid hierarchy, plays into the documentary, about Edward Said and his work at disemboweling and extensive work against orientalism, from Wednesday because orientalism is an enframing discourse. Edward Said was from Palestine (I believe); his education took place in boarding schools and western high education.  Helena asked us this would have influenced him. Personally, I find it contradicting, to a point, that the man hailed as picking apart orientalism and providing paths for ‘better’ education and learning, with reference to the Middle East, had a very, seemingly, disconnected with relation to Middle Eastern (more accurately Palestinian) life. If Said attended all of these western institutions, where he would have been ingrained with thinking from a western perspective and did not participate in the same way with his birthplace as others born there, how can he speak with such authority about the experiences of Middle Easterns as a whole. Granted he seemed, to my western view, to hold many insights, but I have to ask how his western and class privileged up bringing influenced him? I want to ask him if he was aware of these influences? Did he really make an effort to move past his, inherent, indoctrination from his schooling and privilege? And along with this its interesting that Said’s nephew is now writing where his Uncle Said left over—sort of. I wonder what privilege (if any) is acting that ‘allows’ them to be the spokes person? Though, along with these questions an equally important one to ask is, if he had lived local and gone to the local schools, would we, the west, have even listened to him?

            To place more focus on the documentary, I really wish it had been done after 9/11. I feel like Said would have so much to say about what occurred then. The relationships he pointed out, I feel like would have been heightened. I was actually surprised by the reactions in the 90s to the Oklahoma bombings. In my mind the negativity and targeting of Muslims and Middle Easterners began after 9/11. Ignorant? Yes. I think this occurred for me because I never had words to express or question the practices and also, I was only in 4^th grade when the attacks occurred.  As Said talked, I was further blown away by the common placement and abundance of on the ground Middle Eastern paranoia. I really shouldn’t have; I have taken Chuck’s America’s Middle East course, in which we read about all the ways that the US has created a slanted singular view of Middle Easterners. The thing that still strikes me is how the media images of how the ‘bad guy’ was often, supposedly/apparently, depicted as Middle Eastern, because I never made the connection. I did not the much of anything about the region until college. It was not taught much beyond geography class. We did not get to Iran as planned in my Comparative Governments class. In my World History we discussed Byzantine, but spent the most of the time on China. The one image I do know I gained was the impression that culture moved out of the ‘fertile crescent’ to the East and later to the West (it temporarily stopped in northern Africa, but not for long). Now, I do not agree with this at all, but these were the images I held through my schooling. So maybe the media coverage that Said talks about affected me more than I realized.