Orientalism and PostcolonialTheory

This course will seek to analyze some philosophical and interpretative problems raised by recent works in a field generally described as 'postcolonial theory'. At the center of the discussion would be the themes of Eurocentrism and Orientalism. While the questions associated with this field are highly significant, there is much that is indeterminate about this area of social theory. The course will start with an historical analysis of the original debates about 'Orientalism' and the nature of its arguments. It will start with a preliminary reading of Said’s Orientalism. It will then take up for a direct critical examination textual traditions that were the objects of the Orientalism debate – representative examples of European Orientalist literature – which claimed to produce, for the first time, 'scientific' studies of Oriental societies (work of linguists like William Jones, or historians like James Mill), studies of Middle Eastern Islamic societies analyzed by Said, segments of philosophies of history which dealt with non-European societies and found a place for them in a scheme of 'universal history' ( Hegel, Marx, Mill, Weber). We shall then turn to ask if social science knowledge about non-European societies still carry the methodological features of Orientalism. As Orientalism spread across different fields of modern culture – not just academic knowledge, but also art and aesthetic representations,  the next two weeks fictional and visual representations will be taken up for critical analysis.  This will be followed by a study of texts in which intellectuals from non-European societies from Asia and Africa responded to the cognitive and cultural claims of the European Orientalist literature. In the last section the course will focus on three aspects of the postcolonial critique:

1. the question of representation ,
2. the question of the writing of history, and
3. the logic of basic concepts in social sciences.