The Orientalist Perspective as an Enframing Discourse

In class, we discussed that orientalism is an enframing discourse. The word oriental itself comes from the word orient, which means the east, while the occident is the west. The orientalist perspective is the perspective used to depict a subject from the Eastern culture. As we focused on the Middle East we watched a movie about the book Orientalism written by Edward Said.

He used art as a means to show the West’s depiction of the Middle Eastern culture. We used the knowledge from this book to reanalyze the book we previously read, Colonizing Egypt. The movie talked about how the depiction of people who visited the middle-east made a lot of stereotypical accuses. These people made people in the Middle East look frightening. They created a representation of Arab people that does not really represent the Arab people as a whole. For example, they show through the art works how the men always have a long beard, scary eyes, and always get beaten in war.

In colonizing Egypt, Timothy Mitchell also did the same thing, when he explained how the France rebuilt Egypt in their World Exhibitions. Through the eyes of the western world, Egypt was rebuilt in an exact way how it looks in the outside, but not really in the inside. In the video, we might agree that most Arab men have a long beard but their personalities, which was depicted as scary and heartless, was wrong.

To some extent, I would agree with Said Edwards when he said that the North American perspectives of the Middle East in general are politicized by the Israel. This racism towards the Middle East people, are more and less one of the important reasons to consider when we analyze the reason for the conflicts between these two regions. Said Edwards, repeated how since the early days of film, when media started revolutionizing, the Middle East was already represented negatively.  The “threatening and demonizing figure of Middle East in the Journal, Media, and Hollywood”, showed how fanatic and extremist the region is. Not just the Middle East, Said Edwards also discussed about how Islam is seen by the western. He said that, Islam is seen to promote violence repeating the line of development. Muslims are seen as villains and they came out with the ideology that it is hard to deal with the Nulsims and make them listen, so the only way of doing it is “to give them a bloody nose”.  Islam has been depicted as the enemy, and that there is no knowledge that can confront this unless the good western people go to the Middle East and experience the culture themselves.

Mitchell also analyzed enframing. He talked about the way the new city of Cairo which is structured or built in the panoptical model, which is how the prisons are built nowadays..  This building style is where all the activities of the area can be monitored from the center.  The “new methods of order were seeking to penetrate, colonize, and multiply” (Mitchel, 4). In this way, everyone is under control, and that everyone will start adapting to feel in control, so they will not go against order. This is an example of enframing, as enframing means a creation of a fixed hierarchy of meanings with the aim of creating a systematic knowledge and/or explaining the useful potential of an object or person. I hope this essay shows how enframing is an orientalist perspective.

Rossa D.