Neo-Orientalism — The Orientalism of the Orient.

The awakening of Edward Said through Ramy Youssef.

Edward Said was a Palestinian-American public intellectual and literary critic whose seminal work “Orientalism” (1978) has played a pivotal role in shaping post-colonial theory.  Through his work, Dr Said tries to inform the audience that the knowledge produced regarding the Orient (the east, in most cases regarding the Middle East and India but the orient can also have an expansive meaning that takes into consideration far east Asian countries) is tainted by the Occident (the west, mostly pertaining to Europe and America). Dr Said sheds light upon the role of 18th and 19th century empire in the production of knowledge and its role in cultural analysis and criticism, Said also addresses the shift from European Orientalism (Mainly of the two strongest empires, i.e British and French) to American Orientalism (that started to gain popularity after the second world war and peaked after the cold war, when America started to gain cultural hegemony. Post world war one, Carl Schmitt predicted the death of the European world order and the birth of an American one).

Dr Said discussed a couple of meanings and definitions of Orientalism but the one that fits well with the subject of this article is the one below. 

“Orientalism can be discussed and analysed as the corporate institute for dealing with the Orient —dealing with it by making statements about it, authorising views of it, describing it, by teaching it, selling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the orient.”

Dr Said studied in Jerusalem, Egypt and America and went on to be a professor of comparative literature at Columbia University. He passed away in September 2003.

Ramy Youssef is an American writer, director and stand-comedian of Egyptian descent.  Youssef is best known for his semi-autobiographical show Ramy. The show revolves around Ramy’s struggle with his identity as a practising Muslim barraged with problems like millennial depression, porn addiction, American solipsism and myopia. The show also has interesting sub-plots revolving around Ramy’s mother who deals with the existential crisis of being a housewife and Ramy’s uncle who is struggling to come to terms with his homosexuality. 

The reason Ramy Youssef is mentioned within the context of Edward Said is because often times during the course of the show Youssef’s behaviour overlaps with Said-ian Orientalism and also presents a Neo-Orientalism that is an oscillation between Western knowledge and Eastern sensibilities. The show reiterates and reexamines the concept of Orientalism that Dr Said laid out 43 years earlier. 

In the 9th episode of the first season Ramy travels to Egypt for some “soul-searching”. Ramy and his cousin brother Shadi can be very well seen as anthropomorphised versions of the  occident/orient dichotomy. Ramy behaves in a manner that reinforces Dr Said’s notion of Orientalism that suggests a serious, perhaps ponderous style of expertise.

Ramy rambles on about having an authentic experience—he expresses his desire to see the mosques, visit the site of the 2011 Egyptian revolution and meet his grand father. Shadi dismisses Ramy’s Egyptian itinerary and assures Ramy that he will show him the “real Cairo”, immediately after which Shadi asks Ramy if he wants to eat at Chilli’s to which Ramy responds with a pinch of disdain that he’d rather eat some Egyptian food. 

Through out the episode through instances such as these Ramy fortifies the idea of a western orientalist that sees and studies the orient as the other and “a kind of intellectual authority over the orient within western culture.”

Shadi escorts Ramy to a party where they have a confrontation about their differences, Ramy displays his dismay for Shadi’s constant use of the N word, Shadi hilariously and unabashedly shuns Ramy’s political correctness by giving him a geography crash-course and telling him that Egypt is in Africa and that they’re black, hence giving them leeway to use the term. 

 Ramy presents himself in a way similar to Arthur James Balfour when he lectured the house of commons on the problems with which they have to deal in Egypt, in 1910. Balfour was an influential figure who fulfilled duties of being the prime minister of United Kingdom, secretary for Scotland and other high ranking positions during the days of empire, including the British occupation of Egypt in 1882. In Orientalism, Dr Said demonstrates economic plunder and production of knowledge masquerading as welfare by Empire through the example of Arthur Balfour. 

While addressing the house of commons, Balfour repeatedly showcases the knowledge mined by the British empire about Egypt as all encompassing truths and as reason enough to have a strong economic and military presence in Egypt. Balfour states Egypt’s lack of self-governance through the interpretation of self-produced knowledge as reason to stay, instead of stating the obvious intention of it being a profit earning enterprise. 

In a very rudimentary way, Ramy is also seen using his self-produced knowledge to view the reality of Egypt in a Balfour-ian way. Ramy wants to distance himself from everything American in Egypt, from fast food restaurants to parties with electronic music forgetting that the east in its true form exist with these juxtapositions and doesn’t exist untouched by post-materialism. Ramy regurgitates his gleeful imagination of the Egyptian revolution that took place at Tahrir square a couple of times before Shadi shuts him up with his lived experience of having friends die in front of his eyes due to the revolution. 

Academic chatter keeps trickling down into pop culture creating pop psychology and pop philosophy in a “life imitates art, art imitates life” sort of way. The humanities departments in universities are pimping their rides by adding niche degrees such as gender studies and critical race theory. With that comes the pressure on pop culture to be more “real” and “inclusive”, shows like Seinfeld and Friends have retrospectively received backlash for all white casts and lack of the POC perspective. Shows like Ramy win the golden globe and movies like Parasite win the Oscars, digressing from the fact that the Oscars and golden globe are American institutes of recognition and documentation of art and culture. To show concern over eastern pieces of cinematic material winning western/American (taking the liberty to use the terms interchangeably) accolades may come across as oversaturated paranoia. But through the works of post-colonial theorists (like Dr Said) and post-modern theorists (like Jean Baudrillard) we have come to learn that literary texts and media creations start to stand in for material reality and events.  

Shows like Youssef’s Ramy are a new breed of Orientalism that may not have a secretive devious plan to malign the east but it presents itself as a representation of the east, which it is not, it still is a representation of the relationship the west has with the east, by the west. In the same way Dr Said’s critique presents itself, for which there are plenty rebuttals.

Giving myself the liberty to play Nostradamus, I would say this new hybrid orientalism will affect conversations on culture and representation if cinema continues to push the idea of cultural integration as noble. The east will rise in sometimes regressive ways (like Love Jihad) to combat the esoteric fashion in which the west will try to represent the east to defend their culture because the means of producing this knowledge will always lay in the hands of the hegemonic class. The only way to combat this Neo-Orientalism is to recognise the proliferation of hyper-individualism and understand the importance of and the reason for collective ideology in the east. 

“Knowledge is not innocent but profoundly connected with the operations of power.”