> do you deny the Orientalist
>moment in the Old Moor himself. Do I need to dig up the references to
>"Chinese stupidity," vegetative Asiatics, the AMP, and the like? Do you
>not think Marx -- and some Marxisms -- are infected by eurocentrism. I am
>with Amin and Meszaros on this, amongst others.
I don't think that Marx was Eurocentric or racist or anything else like that. You can't blame Marx for the fact that Capital started in Europe. Far from being the case that Marx was a racist, it was Marx who founded internationalism, and championed the cause of anti-slavery amongst the British working class. Marxists like Lenin made anti-racism into a cause when English and American liberals took it as read that eugenics had 'proved' the moral inferiority of non-white races.
It shows a lack of good sense and proportion to convict Marx of racism when, if Marxists like Lenin had not given vent to the anti-imperialist revolt there would in all probability have been no anti-racism in America or anywhere else. It was principally the American ruling class's defensiveness about the propaganda that the Marxists were making over southern Racism that provoked the establishment's desegregation drive.
Typically, Marx was convicted of being a Jew and Lenin an Asiatic for the first eighty years of the Marxist movement, and after that they were convicted of being anti-Semites and racists. The shift had nothing to do with Marxism and everything to do with the shifting attitude of the capitalist ideologues. The fact that these ideologues could no longer defend their original white supremacist ideology was due primarily to the challenge that Marxism made to it.
I agree with Manjur and Yoshie about Said. But that said, it's still a great book.
Or as Marshall Sahlins says
'In anthropology there are some things that are better left un-Said' 'Orientalism', in Waiting for Foucault and other aphorisms, Prickly Pear, 1999, p30.
In message <v03130300b4afc9e72e13@[140.254.112.152]>, Yoshie Furuhashi
<furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> writes
>In short, Said obscures the origin of Orientalism by falsely assimilating
>the world before capitalism (including ancient Greece!) to our modern world.
In message <000b01bf657b$25988ac0$0101a8c0 at hphewlettpack>, Nasreen Karim
<karim at rnet.com> writes
> he failed to historcize "Orientalism." "Orientalism", in
> Said's text, appears in an overarching, transhistorical, hence
> un-Foucauldian manner.
-- Jim heartfield