Darwinist premise in the Orientalist construction of the “Other” - JPCS

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies
ISSN No. 1948-1845 (Print); 1948-1853 (Electronic)
The Darwinist Orientalist mindset was articulated in the works of western academicians,
politicians, statesmen, scholars and scientists altogether. For example, Albert Beveridge’s
speech before the Senate in 1900 referred to the Filipinos as “a barbarous race modified by
three centuries of contact with a decadent race [the Spanish].” Beveridge’s point was that the
Filipinos, due to their biological constitution, were incapable of self-government: “They are
not capable of self-government. How could they be? They are not a self-governing race. It is
barely possible that 1,000 men in all the archipelago are capable of self-government in the
Anglo-Saxon sense. They are Orientals, Malays” ( qtd. in Go 39). Senator Beveridge’s
derogatory discourse revealed the function that all colonial discourse putatively fulfills: “To
construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin in
order to justify conquest” (Bhabha 70).
Race was an operative factor in colonial structure, and that racial difference was deemed to
be the cause of behavior and inferiority. Nature, in terms of a people’s biology, blood, and
stock, was the substance of difference. This colonial racial discourse shared underlying
themes, not least of which was that the Anglo-Saxon “race” was superior and that American
democracy was a sign of that superiority (Burch 78-101).
Orientalism in Saidian sense was based on biological racism, Lamarckian environmentalism
and sociobological distinction. In the Orientalist schema, the “Orient” is the different
“Other”; the opposite of the European. Cromer says, “. . . I content myself with noting the
fact that somehow or other the Oriental generally acts, speaks, and thinks in a manner exactly
opposite to the European” (qtd. in Said 39). S. Seidman suggests that sociologists might
learn from Said’s work and take seriously “the problem of difference” and the “production of
“Otherness” (315). Jukka Jouhki in “Orientalism and India” reflects that “Said obviously sees
many variations and modes in the ways Europeans have constructed the “Orient” ” (3). For
Said the differences between Orientalist writers, their personal style and form of writing have
been explicit, but the basic content of their writing, that is “the separateness of the “Orient” ,
its eccentricity, its backwardness, its silent indifference, its feminine penetrability, its supine
malleability” has reflected the more or less unified latent Orientalism. Moreover, latent
Orientalism and race classifications have supported each other very well, especially in the
nineteenth century. The “second-order Darwinism,” of Orientalism has seemed to justify
division of races to backward and advanced, and further, using a binary typology, to
backward and advanced cultures and societies. The lesser civilizations have been thought to
have suffered from the limitations caused by the biological composition of their race (Jouhki
3-4). Hence they have been seen as in need of moral-political admonishment and even
colonization by Europeans. As other marginalized people, the Orientals have been seen
through (not looked at) and analyzed as problems (not as citizens), or confined or taken over.
As Said states, whenever something was designated as Oriental, the act included an
evaluative judgment. “Since the Oriental was a member of a subject race, he had to be
subjected” (Said 206–207).
‘Darwinist premise in the Orientalist construction of the “Other”,’ Mohamed Hamoud Kassim Al-
Mahfedi and Venkatesh P
JPCS Vol 3, No 1, 2012
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