The Oriental Rebel in Western History

Abstract

Edward Said's Orientalism through deconstructing colonial discourses of power-knowledge postulates that colonization for the colonized has a particular ontological finality, reification. I contend here that the process of subjection has a far more profound effect than merely reifying the colonized, to borrow from Anouar Abdel-Malek, as customary, passive, non-participating, and non-autonomous. Rather, Western imperial narratives and what Said calls its “evaluative judgments” and “program of actions” also come to interpellate the reified subject's cosmovision, agency, and its forms of resistance. Focusing on the Middle East, this study is a genealogy that exposes how techniques and technologies of imperial power have symbolically and materially produced the Oriental rebel in Western history. Through re-reading institutionalized knowledges and resurrecting a counter-history, this article reveals a hidden and buried discursive formation, one which I call counter-revolutionary discourse. I argue that this system of thought is built through dispersed and heterogeneous but power-laden statements from Aymeric and Comte de Volney to Napoleon Bonaparte, Ernest Renan, Gustave Le Bon, and Thomas Friedman.

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