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Lion King Edward Said is a major critic who has attempted to open Western culture up to the discourses of Arab culture. He begins by comparing those who traditionally described the Orient or Orientalists. These are all books about characters who imagine that they can find in reality the fictional world they found represented in books. Their failure reveals that the books they have read were misrepresentations of reality. The Orient: signifies a system of representations framed by political forces that brought the Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness, and Western empire. The Orient exists for the West, and is constructed by and in relation to the West.
It is a mirror image of what is inferior and alien (Other) to the West. Orientalism is a manner of regularized (or Orientalized) writing, vision, and study, dominated by imperatives, perspectives, and ideological biases ostensibly suited to the Orient. It is the image of the Orient expressed as an entire system of thought and scholarship. The Oriental: is the person represented by such thinking.
The man is depicted as feminine, weak, yet strangely dangerous because poses a threat to white, Western women. The woman is both eager to be dominated and strikingly exotic. The Oriental is a single image, a sweeping generalization, a stereotype that crosses countless cultural and national boundaries. According to Said, when travelers first visit a foreign land they feel threatened by the newness and strangeness of the foreign culture. As a result, they try to explain the culture and make it less threatening by referring back to the travel books, they read before they began their trip, that describe this culture. After traveling in a foreign country, travelers often say that their experience was not what they expected from reading the travel book.
Few books on the Middle East have aroused more controversy than this dazzling attack on traditional scholarship. Said is relentless in exposing the hidden, and not-so-hidden, agendas and assumptions of many Western scholars who have written about the Middle East. He brings to the task of deconstructing the arguments of self-described Orientalist the tools of the literary critic and he takes no prisoners. His detractors, most notably Bernard Lewis, fault him for careless scholarship and for rejecting virtually the whole corpus of Western writing on the Middle East. However, no one writing on the Middle East today can be as unselfconscious about the assumptions made or questions asked as those who preceded Said. He has also spawned a new field of Occidentalism, which examines how writers in the Middle East looked at the West.
Orientalism, according to Edward Said, is inherently linked with knowledge of the Other and the literati elite who deal with this knowledge. As he states, [Orientalism] is a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts, ... , it is, above all, a discourse... shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political (as with a colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning sciences like comparative linguistics, anatomy, or any other modern policy science), power cultural (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values), power moral (as with ideas about what we do and what they cannot do or understand as we do (p. 12). This discourse was largely shaped in the political realities of the 19 th century but its beginnings lie farther back in time.
Said traces it back through Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Dante, all the way to the ancient Greeks. In this sense, the intellectual class was one social grouping responsible for the shaping of Orientalism. Said is very clear in stating that Orientalism was not the product of colonial rule. He writes, To say simply that Orientalism was a rationalization of colonial rule is to ignore the extent to which colonial rule was justified in advance by Orientalism, rather than after the fact (p. 39).
Hence, Orientalism as a pattern of knowledge preceded colonialism. Nevertheless, it found willing partners among the diplomats and political leaders of the British, French and American empires. Said points out that the vision of Orient existed as far back as the ancient Greeks. However, prior to the colonial era, it is a literary discourse bound in a tradition of writers, texts and conceptualizations. He writes, Every writer on the Orient (and this is true even of Homer) assumes some Oriental precedent, some previous knowledge of the Orient, to which he refers and on which he relies (p. 20). Said points towards Aeschyluss The Persians as an example of early attempts to create an Orient.
However, it is fairly recently that Orientalism has become a science or an extended body of knowledge and tradition. Said points towards two 18 th century intellectuals who spearheaded the transition of Orientalism from literary to scientific knowledge. One is Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron (1731 - 1805) who translated the Avesta and interjected a vision of innumerable civilizations from ages past, of an infinity of literatures into the intellectual tradition of Europe (p. 77). The second scholar is William Jones, who Said cites as the accepted founder of Orientalism. As Said states, To rule and to learn, then to compare Orient with Occident: these were Jones goals (p. 78). He did that by codifying, tabulating and comparing all he encountered in the Orient.
These two scholars took Orientalism out of its literary root and supplanted it with a seemingly scientific and objective one. Said calls into question the underlying assumptions that form the foundation of Orientalist thinking. A rejection of Orientalism entails a rejection of biological generalizations, cultural constructions, and racial and religious prejudices. It is a rejection of greed as a primary motivating factor in intellectual pursuit. It is an erasure of the line between the West and the Other. Said argues for the use of narrative rather than vision in interpreting the geographical landscape known as the Orient, meaning that a historian and a scholar would turn not to a panoramic view of half of the globe, but rather to a focused and complex type of history that allows space for the dynamic variety of human experience.
Rejection of Orientalist thinking does not entail a denial of the differences between the West and the Orient, but rather an evaluation of such differences in a more critical and objective fashion. The Orient cannot be studied in a non-Orientalist manner; rather, the scholar is obliged to study more focused and smaller culturally consistent regions. Edwards Said's book Orientalism that was published in 1978 had a great influence in a different range of disciplines. The principle of the book can be easily applied for examining the Other in The Lion King by Walt Disney. This animated film opens with the themes song The Circle Of Life playing as the camera show Mufasa, king of the lions holding his newborn son Simba.
The It is the tale of birth, childhood and eventual manhood of Simba, a young lion cub. The cub is held over a dramatic ledge of rock and all his future heirs. The whole community of animals is here at Pride Rock to witness young Simba because he is the future king. Everyone in the kingdom is happy about the birth of the new prince except for one lion.
That lion is Scar. Scar is Mufasa's brother and was next in line to be king before Simba took his place. Scar is angry and jealous of young Simba. Young Simba is a very happy lion.
He plays all the time with his best friend, a lioness named Nala. Simba is watched by the bird Zazu, and when Zazu tells Simba that one day he will be king, Simba is more then happy bursting into the song I Just Cant Wait To Be King. Scar meanwhile has other plans for Simba. One day Scar sends Simba to play in the elephant graveyard and Scar sends his minions, they hyenas there. The hyenas try to kill Simba but Mufasa shows up and saves Simba. When Scar learns of this, he becomes angered even more and sings Be Prepared in reference to his plan to kill Simba.
Scar has the plan set. He lures Simba to the gorge and gets him to wait there, while the hyenas cause a stampede of the wilder beast. Scar knows that Simba has no chance of surviving the stampede. Simba is on his way to doom when Mufasa comes to his aid again. Mufasa gets Simba out of harms way but in the process finds himself hanging off a cliff. Scar sees this and rushes to the cliff but not to save Mufasa but to make sure he dies.
Scar then tells Simba that he should leave because Mufasa's death was his fault and the kingdom will be angry with him. Simba departs Pride Rock very solemnly. Simba finds his own place to live far away. He then meets Timon (a wisecracking merest) and Simba (a goofy warthog).
Timon and Simba become his best friends. They teach Simba to live with no worries. The three of them sing Hakuna Matt. As time passes Timon and Simba raise Simba, they become his family. Simba is a full-grown lion now, much resembling his father. Meanwhile, Pride Rock is in shambles.
There is no food and there are hyenas everywhere. Scar and the hyenas have ruined the once great Pride Rock. Scar makes it the lionesses job to go out and find food. One day while out hunting for food a fully-grown Nala ventures to near Simba's home. The two recognize each other fully grown. Nala tells Simba that everyone thought he was dead.
She informs him of the kingdoms state and tells him that he should return and take his place as king. Simba refuses because he feels he has been gone too long. Also in the back of his mind, he still feels guilty and responsible for Mufasa's death. Nala is angered and storms off. Simba goes off to think and while has thinking he calls to his father for help.
Mufasa appears to Sima in the clouds. Mufasa tells Simba that he must take his place in the circle of life and go take the throne as he was born to. Rafiki, the wise old baboon who knew Simba was alive all along comes to Simba to encourage him to go back and to show him he is fit to be king. Rafiki shows Simba his reflection in the water and Simba see the lion he has become, he sees his father in him and at that moment, he realizes he should be king.
Simba goes and finds Nala. They fall in love and sing Can You Feel The Love Tonight, Timon and Simba realize they are losing there friend to love and sing there version too. Simba returns to the kingdom on his own and sees how bad it is. Nala comes back with Timon and Simba. When Simba gets to Pride Rock, he sees Scar and Cerabi (Simba's mother) are fighting over why there is no food. Scar strikes Cerabi.
At this moment, Simba makes himself known with a ferocious roar. Scar initially thinks Simba is Mufasa and is scared; Scar begins to suck up to Simba. Simba turns to his mother and tells her that its him and she and the other lionesses are happy. When Scar realizes its Simba and not Mufasa, he tries to manipulate Simba. Scar tells Simba to tell the lionesses who is responsible for Mufasa's death, knowing Simba will say himself.
Simba says its him and everyone is shocked. Scar and the hyenas begin to torment Simba calling him a murderer and backing him off a cliff. Scar then hovers over Simba, as Simba hangs, just as Scar hovered over Mufasa while he was hanging. Scar leans over and whispers to Simba that he is really the one who killed Mufasa. Simba flies into a rage and jumps off the cliff calling Scar the murderer. The two fight, as the lionesses take Simba's side and the hyenas back up Scar.
Simba gets the best of Scar and ends up turning the hyenas against him. Simba throws Scar off the cliff where the hyenas await to devour him. Sources: Beard, Michael. Between West and World. Diacritics (Winter 1979), 9 (4): 2 - 12. Beard, Michael.
World Literature Today (Winter 1980), 54 (1): 177. Gordon, David C. Orientalism. Antioch Review (Winter 1982), 40 (1): 104 - 112. Gran, Peter.
Journal of the American Oriental Society (July-October 1980), 100 (3): 328 - 331. Greene, Thomas M. One Worlds, Divisible. Yale Review (Summer 577 - 581. Luckett, Richard.
On Inhumane Discourse. Cambridge Quarterly (1982), 10 (3): 271 - 281. Multi-Douglas, Few. Re-Orienting Orientalism. Virginia Quarterly Review (Autumn 1979), 55 (4): 724 - 733.
Path, Raphael. The Orientalist Conspiracy. Midstream (November 62 - 66. Sieburth, Richard.
Orient as Idiom. Canto (1979), 2 (4): 156 - 167. Woodcock, George. The Challenge of the Other. Queens Quarterly (Summer 1980), 87 (2): 298 - 209.
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