Edward Said’s flagship work, the theory of ‘Orientalism’, has been celebrated as post-colonial propaganda in which ‘cultural force’ is seen as a crucial aspect in relating the ideology of the West to the East. Both the West and the East, in their observation of the fact of ‘cultural force’, have their own ways of defining and applying it, albeit sometimes selfishly and autocratically like the West and sometimes slavishly and spontaneously like the East. In our process of dissecting and supporting the above theme, we will attempt to define “cultural force” and its importance from both Western and Eastern perspectives.
Defining ‘cultural force’ can support the idea of encouraging a nation to establish its cultural identity through various means and forms, such as cultural imposition. By establishing its culture, a nation can assert its spontaneous flourishing without dominating other nations or it can keep the course by demeaning or caricature other nations to vividly display its superiority over them. And the latter happens in the case of Westerners who are always concerned about their authority over Easterners for their own identity. Said’s cultural study of the West and East in his “Orientalism” exhibits the multifaceted application and observation of “cultural force.” In this regard, Said states that “cultural force is not something that we can discuss very easily, and one of the purposes of this work is to illustrate, analyze and reflect on Orientalism as an exercise of cultural force”.
For the West, Orientalism is its “cultural force” manifested through dominant differences from the Middle East. Said observes: “European culture gained strength and identity by opposing the Orient as a kind of substitute and even clandestine…”. The West practices its ‘cultural force’ through its atrocity in defining and shaping an Orient that can never speak for itself as the West thinks: “they cannot represent themselves; they must speak for themselves.”
Western culture shows its strength through its imposition on foreigners or the East. They resent injecting their culture into the brains of the Orientals and even the Orientals are made to think in their own way. This is the very force of their culture, albeit negative, defining others on the basis of their culture, as Said describes it through his theory of Orientalism: “Orientalism is best understood as a set of restrictions and limitations of the thought than as a set of restrictions and limitations of thought”. simply as a positive doctrine.” this is the orientalism that in this way ensures the authorized practice of the ‘cultural force’ of the West over the East.
Westerners have a strong influence of their culture when they try to define and identify the East as something apart from the East. Their culture of superiority complex and egotistical definition of things allow them to delineate the Orient with a misrepresentation that has an external idea as Said says, “Orientalism is based on externality”. The cultural tendency to generalize an egotistical idea about the whole East from a single awkward case is strong enough evidence of its vehement force derived from its culture. From a distant and safe point of view, the West looks at Eastern cultures, albeit inappropriately, and concludes that they are petty and fanatical cultures, since its imaginary view of Easterners is: “The Easterner is irrational, depraved (fallen), childish, ‘different’; thus the European is rational, virtuous, mature and ‘normal'”.
The strength of Western culture is their belief that they are the most culturally sensible in this world and this may be their false ideology to avoid the fear of losing authority or power. Their culture gives them the ‘white man’s burden’ which they relieve by schooling, punishing, rectifying, and ultimately civilizing the Orient: “The Orient was seen as being framed by the classroom, the criminal court, the prison, the illustrated textbook.” . This pervasive and powerful encroachment of the West’s “cultural force” on the East is subtly illustrated in Said’s comment: “However, what gave the Eastern world its intelligibility and identity was not the result of its own efforts, but more good of the whole complex series”. of wise manipulations by which the East was identified by the West”.
This is the deliberately superficial study of the East that gave the West the license to draw conclusions about the East on its own. This culture of their superficial and crude study of others through travel books and other similar sources allows them to take on the eastern as ‘fierce lion’ where finally the fierceness is highlighted instead of the lion and therefore “no longer there are lions but their fierceness-“. . And even Arthur James Balfour, an emissary from the Europeans, arbitrarily but absurdly claims West dominance over East when he says: “We know the civilization of Egypt better than the civilization of any other country.”
This unfair clash of ‘cultural force’ will continue until the East dares to expose its ‘cultural force’. Such is Said’s expression:
Such a silent Orient, available to Europe for the realization of projects involving but never directly responsible for the native inhabitants, and unable to resist the projects, images, or mere descriptions devised for it…a relationship between Western writing (and its consequences) and the eastern silence, fruit and sign of the great cultural force of the West, of its will to power over the East… books about ferocious lions will do as long as the lions can respond.
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the Orient steadily and gradually sought to manifest its “cultural strength” with the blessing of modern Orientalism or “Oriental Renaissance” which ignited a new awareness of the Orient among thinkers, politicians, and artists around the world. the world. the world. The newly discovered and modern translation and interpretation of Eastern texts in Eastern languages such as Sanskrit, Zend, and Arabic made it possible for the East to promote and display its cultural strength.
The unprejudiced, fresh and new perspective of the old arbitrary custom gave it the opportunity to truly and gradually flourish. Non-Europeans have the right to define and establish their identity as Orientals apart from the adverse interference of Europeans. Their ‘cultural force’ is gradually being emphatically redefined by the Easterners themselves and given their true form as the embodiment of the entire Orient.
