Review Essays
Saidism without Said:
Orientalism and U.S. Diplomatic History
ANDREW J. ROTTER
AMERICAN DIPLOMATIC HISTORIANS may not be interested in Edward Said, but he is
interested in them. While Orientalism was primarily a study of British and French
representations of Middle Eastern Others in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Said nevertheless devoted a good deal of space to the period after 1945, when
American power supplanted that of Great Britain and France, and Americans, he
argued, inherited the Western Orientalist apparatus. American Orientalism went
well beyond vaguely populist stereotypes that Arabs or Muslims were prone to
violence, incapable of rational thought, untrustworthy, devious, and unclean.
Instead, "the Middle East experts who advise [U.S.] policymakers are imbued with
Orientalism, almost to a person." Since 1978, as Said has refined his thinking about
imperialism and paid increasing attention to its American version, he has read
broadly in the field of U.S. foreign relations. Footnotes in his Culture and
Imperialism (1993) include works by William Appleman Williams, Richard Van
Alstyne, Walter LaFeber, Michael Hunt, and Paul Kennedy, all of them scholars of
American foreign relations.'
Said's interest in the history of U.S. foreign policy has apparently not been
reciprocated. Articles published over the past twenty years in the journal Diplomatic
History, house organ for the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations
(SHAFR), contain only a few references to Orientalism, most of them charitable but
cursory. Akira Iriye, who has studied the influence of culture on United StatesJapan relations in the twentieth century, made a glancing reference to Orientalism
in his 1979 SHAFR presidential address. Diplomatic History frequently publishes
pleas by senior historians for greater conceptual scope in the field. In one of these
essays, John Lewis Gaddis managed to invoke Stephen Jay Gould, Freeman Dyson,
and Douglas Adams-author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy-but not Said.
Michael Hunt called for "Internationalizing U.S. Diplomatic History" in 1991without Said. In a 1994 essay, Emily S. Rosenberg used cultural analysis, in a
manner reminiscent of Said, to connect two post-World War II films to internaFor suggestions and helpful criticism, I am grateful to Nathan Citino, Michael Grossberg, Carl
Guarneri, Padma Kaimal, Douglas Little, David Robinson, Jeffrey Wasserstrom, and the anonymous
reviewers for the AHR .
1 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978), 321; Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York,
1993).
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Andrew 1. Rotter
tional relations. Responding, Bruce Kuklick referred to a passage in Rosenberg's
article as "intellectual junk, the mental equivalent to eating at McDonald's."
"Cultural studies," he concluded, "needs to do serious research to be more than a
trick." In the spring of 1998, the published version of Rosenberg's SHAFR
presidential address included the single most useful footnote (n. 2) in the brief
history of "culturalist" U.S. foreign relations. But it did not mention Said.?
Extend the boundaries a bit, and the story is much the same. Of roughly thirty
recent books on U.S.-Middle East relations since 1945, only three refer to
Orientalism, and two of these concern U.S. relations with Iran, hardly the
centerpiece of Said's analysis. Over the past six years, the Journal of American
History has published several articles on diplomacy; only one referred to Orientalism. Nor are diplomatic historians alone in the profession in their apparent neglect
of Said. Outside of professional journals, few historians reviewed Orientalism. Said
has been highly influential on the Subaltern Studies group, and Patrick Williams
and Laura Chrisman have credited Orientalism with inaugurating "colonial discourse theory," or postcolonial studies. While some practitioners in this field are
trained in history, most mainstream historians would regard the definition of the
postcolonial-"a specifically anti- or post-colonial discursive purchase in culture,
one which begins in the moment that the colonising power inscribes itself onto the
body and space of its Others and which continues as an often occluded tradition
into the modern theatre of neo-colonialist international relations"-with a bafflement they normally reserve for descriptions of highway engineering or haute
couture. Said's influence on cultural studies and anthropology has not seemingly
been matched by any obvious comparable impact on history.'
Here, I must make a confession: the JAH article referred to above was mine. I am
a diplomatic historian who is ambivalent about Said. On the one hand, I am often
troubled by Said's approach to history, which violates several tenets of my training.
2 Akira Iriye, "Culture and Power: International Relations as Intercultural Relations," Diplomatic
History (DH) 3 (Spring 1979): 117; John Lewis Gaddis, "New Conceptual Approaches to the Study of
American Foreign Relations: Interdisciplinary Perspectives," DH 14 (Summer 1990): 405-23; Michael
H. Hunt, "Internationalizing U.S. Diplomatic History," DH 15 (Winter 1991): 1-11; Emily S.
Rosenberg, "'Foreign Affairs' after World War II: Connecting Sexual and International Politics," and
commentary by Bruce Kuklick, DH 18 (Winter 1994): 59-70, 121-24; Rosenberg, "Revisiting Dollar
Diplomacy," DH 22 (Spring 1998): 156-57; see also Melvyn P. Leffler, "The Cold War: What Do 'We
Now Know'?" AHR 104 (April 1999): 501-24. Diplomatic History did not review books when Orientalism
came out. In 1995, Juan R. I. Cole reviewed Culture and Imperialism, along with Bernard Lewis's Islam
and the West. Cole retrospectively praised Orientalism as "a powerful and theoretically sophisticated
piece of writing that has had a profound and in many ways salutary impact in cultural studies and
anthropology and on the study of the Middle East itself"-note Cole's silence on the book's impact on
history. Cole, "Power, Knowledge, and Orientalism," review of Culture and Imperialism and Islam and
the West, DH 19 (Summer 1995): 510.
3 The three books that take note of Orientalism are Robert D. Kaplan, The Arabists: The Romance
of an American Elite (New York, 1993); Mary Ann Heiss, Empire and Nationhood: The United States,
Great Britain, and Iranian Oil, 1950-1954 (New York, 1997); and James F. Goode, The United States and
Iran: In the Shadow of Mussadiq (New York, 1997). See also Andrew J. Rotter, "Gender Relations,
Foreign Relations: The United States and South Asia, 1947-1964," Journal of American History 81
(September 1994): 518-42; Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, "An Introduction," in Williams and
Chrisman, eds., Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (New York, 1994), 5. The
definition of "the postcolonial" is Stephen SIemon's; quoted in Williams and Chrisman, 12. It is perhaps
worth noting that Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through History, also published in 1993, includes
the section titles "Saints, Terrorists, Blood, and Holy Water," and "Greece: Western Mistress, Eastern
Bride." To acknowledge Orientalism is not, evidently, to avoid it.
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On the other hand, I find myself attracted to Said's arguments-by political
inclination, by admiration for a powerful and interesting mind, and by a sense that
Said is speaking for people whose voices foreign relations specialists have never
fully articulated. Let my organization here reflect both my doubts and my
sympathies: I will begin by summarizing several objections to Said's method, first by
historians generally, then more specifically by diplomatic historians. I will then shift
and indicate some ways in which Said, whether he is acknowledged or not, has
influenced the writing of diplomatic history over the past twenty years, and
conclude by suggesting that opportunities remain for diplomatic historians to do
more with Said's paradigm.
The criticism first. Orientalism is a sprawling book. It treats the development of
an elaborate system of thought, an "imaginative geography," over two centuries and
three nations. Actually, the book ranges even further than that, discovering
antecedents of Orientalism in classical Greece, describing Orientalist features of
philosophy, history, literature, and travelers' accounts, taking note of the politics of
European imperialism, and quoting, sometimes in English, an assortment of
luminaries including Aeschylus, Dante, Gustave Flaubert, Antonio Gramsci, and
Henry Kissinger. Reviewing Orientalism for the Journal of Asian Studies, David
Kopf accused Said of "distorting historical reality," perhaps because he "tried to
include too long a span of years in such a brief book." "Telescoping historical
periods with hasty descriptions is always misleading," Kopf wrote. Said also
conflated the European and American experiences of Orientalism and imperialism.
Orientalism was, Said wrote, a "system of ideas that ... remain[ed] unchanged as
teachable wisdom" from 1840s Europe to the United States in the 1970s. Said's
"starting point" was the "British, French, and American experience of the Orient
taken as a unit," for "the American Oriental position has fit-I think quite
self-consciously-in the places excavated by the two earlier European powers."
Since 1945, the "American imperium has displaced" the French and British, not
altered it. And so on. It is one thing to point out that Americans are naive or
deluded to think that they do not have an empire. To allege that the American
empire is little more than an inheritance from Europeans is to commit Occidentalism, a monolithic approach to "the West" that some Western historians, at least,
find simplistic.'
A second problem some historians have had with Orientalism, and one related to
its broad scope, is the book's lack of basis in sustained historical research.
Orientalism is not an archives book, nor is it based chiefly on historical sources. Said
does not just juxtapose fiction with works of history, he equates the two; it's as if a
quotation from Joseph Conrad has precisely the same historical validity as one from
Lord Curzon-and a good deal more, it might be added, than one from Bernard
4 David Kopf, "Hermeneutics versus History," Journal of Asian Studies 39 (May 1980): 499; Said,
Orientalism, 6, 16-18, 285; Culture and Imperialism, 55; Edward W. Said, The Pen and the Sword:
Conversations with David Barsamian (Monroe, Me., 1994), 80-82. See James Clifford's review of
Orientalism in History and Theory 19, no. 2 (1980): 219. Others have pointed out that Orientalist
attitudes were not neccessarily confined to areas of Asia under Western domination; see, for example,
Edward D. Graham, "The 'Imaginative Geography' of China," in Warren 1. Cohen, ed., Reflections on
Orientalism (East Lansing, Mich., 1983), esp. 31, 35; and Richard H. Minnear, "Orientalism and the
Study of Japan," Journal of Asian Studies 39 (May 1980), esp. 515.
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Lewis. Even friendly reviewers found fault with Orientalism on this score. Juan Cole
complained that Said "jumbled together in his book professional scholars of the
region who possessed a mastery of its languages and culture and who had often
lived there for some time with mere travelers, novelists, and diplomats who ...
seldom had the sort of mastery of philology characteristic of the academics." Talal
Asad, while offering a sturdy defense of Orientalism, nevertheless regretted that
Said had not "rooted his analysis more firmly in the particular conditions within
which this authoritative discourse was historically produced." Said offered "tantalizing observations" of Orientalism's historical context, but they were "barely
developed." Writing in this journal, C. Ernest Dawn was dismissive: "Unfortunately, apart from the demonstration of the relationship of Orientalist beliefs to
European science and scholarship, reiterated vague references to 'imperialism'
constitute the totality of historical analysis." "Historians know," wrote David Kopf,
"that there is no substitute for the hard work of discovering and ordering the data
of past human experience." What some praised as erudition Kopf attacked as
"Said's procedure of dropping names, dates, and anecdotes" in a way that was
"diametrically opposed to history.">
A third and yet more troubling problem for historians reading Orientalism is
Said's dubious epistemological relationship to matters of cause and effect. Discourse theory and postmodernism generally have shaken old certainties about
history as a kind of science, a divining rod, which, properly wielded, will indicate the
truth. In the postmodern universe, there is no truth, just self-serving "realities"
promoted by regimes of power. "Reality is the creature of language," and "Western
Man a modern-day Gulliver, tied down with ideological ropes and incapable of
transcendence because he can never get beyond the veil of language to the reality
'out there,'" as three historians have summarized it. Following Nietzsche and
Heidegger, postmodernists like Michel Foucault deny the linearity of the historical
process; thus "causation should be pitched out." For better or worse, most
historians still believe that they are engaged in a search for reasons why things
happened as they did. An event occurs, like the American Revolution. It is not, they
say, a construct or a representation but a revolution, properly named. There are
reasons why the revolution occurred, and even though historians might assign
different weights to these reasons or argue over whether some of them mattered at
all, they still believe that the causes of the revolution are knowable, that they
preceded the act of revolution itself, and that they are important to understand."
One of the contributions of discourse theory has been to complicate-a virtue, in
its own terms-comfortable assumptions about historical causation. But do the
difficulties of ascribing cause make the effort itself a fool's errand? Said seems
unsure. At times, James Clifford has pointed out, Said "suggests that 'authenticity,'
'experience,' 'reality,' 'presence,' are mere rhetorical contrivances." Elsewhere in
Orientalism, he posits "an old-fashioned existential realism." Sometimes, Orientalism "distorts, dominates, or ignores some real or authentic feature of the Orient";
5 Cole, "Power, Knowledge, and Orientalism," 509; review of Orientalism by Talal Asad, English
Historical Review 95 (July 1980): 648-49; review of Orientalism by C. Ernest Dawn,AHR 84 (December
1979): 1334; Kopf, "Hermeneutics versus History," 499.
6 Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret C. Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New York,
1994), 198-237.
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sometimes, Said "denies the existence of any 'real' Orient." There is, he asserts, a
relationship between the discourse of Orientalism and the exercise of power by the
West over the Mideast. The discourse, Said wrote, "is by no means in direct,
corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced
and exists in uneven exchange with various kinds of power," including political,
intellectual, cultural, and moral. Making allowances for lifting this quotation out of
a longer passage, it is nevertheless reasonable to wonder about the agency of that
word "produced." Does Said mean to say, as his grammar suggests, that the
discourse is "produced ... with various kinds of power" rather than by power, or
that the discourse has an independent source? Is discourse a dependent variable
where power is concerned, providing a reservoir of culturally shaped images from
which the powerful can draw to justify decisions made for reasons of perceived
strategic or economic interest?"
Said's efforts to illuminate these connections are not always successful. Responding to Bernard Lewis's attack on Orientalism, Said insisted that "there is a
remarkable (but nonetheless intelligible) coincidence between the rise of modern
Orientalist scholarship and the acquisition of vast Eastern empires by Britain and
France." "Coincidence" is far from cause and effect. In Culture and Imperialism,
where the relationship between discourse and power is the heart of the matter, Said
admitted: "It is difficult to connect these different realms, to show the involvements
of culture with expanding empires, to make observations about art that preserve its
unique endowments and at the same time map its affiliations." Said's subsequent
use of language indicates the difficulty. His definition of imperialism includes not
just the "practice" and "theory" of domination but also the "attitudes of a
dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory"-a statement that calls
to mind Mark Lilla's comment that "postmodernism is long on attitude and short
on argument." Said struggles to decide whether culture and politics are separate
spheres in some ways connected or finally the same thing. Novels never" 'caused'"
imperialism, but reading Conrad's Heart of Darkness "was part of the European
effort to hold on to, think about, plan for Africa"; and, while no one would construe
Moby Dick as "a mere literary decoration of events in the real world ... the fact is
that during the nineteenth century the United States did expand territorially, most
often at the expense of native peoples, and in time came to gain hegemony over the
North American continent and the territories and seas adjacent to it." That is a fact;
what it has to do with Moby Dick is less clear."
I am picking here at the most provocative and vulnerable part of Said's argument.
Said's notion of power is more refined than the foregoing decontextualized
summary admits. He defines Orientalism as "a style of thought," a way of thinking
about the East in such a way as to dominate it. Orientalism gave the West "the
power to say what was significant about [the Other], classify him among others of
his breed, put him in his place," as Michael Dalby has summarized it. For Said, as
for Foucault, knowledge is power. This equation, however arresting, may not say
Clifford review, 206-08.
Said, Orientalism, 12; Edward W. Said, "Orientalism: An Exchange," New York Review of Books 29
(August 12, 1982): 44; Said, Culture and Imperialism, xii-xiii, 7-9, 20, 57, 68, 70-73, 81, 288-89; Mark
Lilla, "The Politics of Jacques Derrida," New York Review of Books 45 (June 25, 1998): 36.
7
8
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enough to historians of the state. It certainly does not say enough to historians of
U.S. foreign relations, on which more shortly."
Finally, Said most emphatically subverts what historians try to do by confounding
the idea of the subject. In Orientalism, the "Oriental" exists only as a useful creation
of the West, a projection of Western desire and fear, a subject without its own
identity. There is no who there. Lewis imputes to Said the belief "that by learning
Arabic, Englishmen and Frenchmen were committing some kind of offense." That
is perhaps exaggerated. But it does seem that Said's subalterns-human beings, that
is, who are subordinated by more powerful human beings-resist any sort of
genuine depiction by the West, favorable or otherwise. Doris Sommer recalled a
seminar colleague asking Said how Westerners could "achieve a better understanding of the Arab world." Said interrupted the question "to ask why Westerners
suppose that the 'Orient' wants to be understood correctly. Why did we assume that
our interest in the 'Orient' was reciprocated?" Western historians do suppose that
their mission is to understand what happened and why, and they assume that their
understanding can be deepened by studying others as well as themselves, however
those categories are defined. Good historians bring to their subjects a measure of
humility, aware that their grasp of reality is never as sure as they would wish. Yet
to abandon this effort by conceding to the ultimate unknowability of the subject is
to lapse into nihilism. "One can, perhaps, only go on protesting against the tyranny
of the document or of language itself for so long," writes Robert A. Kapp. "Then
one either has to reach some sort of agreement with oneself and get on with the
scholarly work at hand, . .. or else one must face up to the fact of ultimate
inexpressibility and depart from the scene of the struggle-into silence or into some
other walk of life." Said, Kapp adds, has not departed the scene. Yet in his
unwillingness to provide an alternative to Orientalism, Said leaves readers with the
impression that enlightenment is impossible, at least for the benighted likes of
them.t?
ALL OF THESE REASONS why historians have seemed to ignore Said or have struggled
to apply Orientalism to their work have particular resonance for diplomatic
historians. Begin with Said's contention that Orientalism was a system of ideas
largely unbound by time or space, describing British and French thought in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries and American thought in the twentieth.
Historians of American foreign relations who study U.S. imperialism generally deny
that it emerged mimetically from the European version. Some would call it an
"aberration" in American history, a temporary departure from a tradition of
9 Said, Orientalism, 2-3; Michael Dalby, "Nocturnal Labors in the Light of Day," Journal of Asian
Studies 39 (May 1980): 489.
10 Dalby, "Nocturnal Labors," 488; Bernard Lewis, "The Question of Orientalism," New York Review
of Books 29 (June 24, 1982): 51; Doris Sommer, "Resisting the Heat: Menchu, Morison, and
Incompetent Readers," in Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism
(Durham, N.C., 1993),412-13; Robert A. Kapp, "Introduction" to Review Symposium on Orientalism,
Journal of Asian Studies 39 (May 1980): 483-84. Bryan D. Palmer, who calls Said one of Foucault's
"cautious advocates," provides inspiration here; see Palmer, Descent into Discourse: The Reification of
Language and the Writing of Social History (Philadelphia, 1990), 28.
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isolationism. The more commonly accepted argument is that the United States was
congenitally imperialistic, starting with the determination of white settlers to move
across the North American continent, displacing and dominating the Indians as
they went. The decision for imperialism after 1898 was an outward projection of
expansionist values peculiar to Americans, and the empire formed thereafter, in
Latin America and Asia, was an "informal" one, in which remote nations were
bound to the United States not so much by political institutions as by economic (and
later cultural) attachments. Diplomatic historians who hold this view, including
most of those cited by Said in Culture and Imperialism, are no less critical of empire
than is he. But having studied the record, they have concluded that the American
empire was in important respects different from its European counterparts.
Creating an empire is more complicated than borrowing a garden hose from a
neighbor. European Orientalism was diluted in the United States: as Nathan Citino
notes, U.S. "encounters with Islamic societies have been slight, its tradition of
'Orientalist' literature meager, and, with certain twentieth-century exceptions ...
Islamic studies have not been strong at American universities."ll
The lack of historical research underpinning Orientalism is a special problem for
diplomatic historians. They are trained to plumb deeply in archives, rather like the
modern Orientalists Said deplores. They take pride in being paleographers of
diplomatese, and can only feel chagrin at the prospect that language might beguile,
or signify virtually anything. In its epigrammatic style, its intermingling of historical
and literary sources, Orientalism is simply not the kind of book with which most
diplomatic historians feel secure. And, while diplomatic historians are not as a
group politically conservative, they tend to be temperamentally buttoned down.
Said approvingly quotes Hugo of St. Victor, a twelfth-century Saxon monk: "The
man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil
is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is
as a foreign land." Such sentiment seems appropriate for Said, whose family
became refugees when he was very young. It might make diplomatic historians
queasy. They willingly visit archives all over the world, but to dissolve their national
identity, as Hugo implies, is to deprive their perspective on the past of a center, or
of multiple centers.'>
For diplomatic historians, the link between cause and effect is crucial, and this
constitutes another area of disagreement with Said. In a perceptive 1995 Diplomatic
History essay, Melvyn P. Leffler complained that "the post-modernist emphasis on
culture, language, and rhetoric often diverts attention from questions of causation
and agency." The problem with discourse theory specifically "is that although we
might learn that seemingly unconnected phenomena are related in some diffuse
ways, we do not necessarily get much insight into how relatively important these
relationships are to one another." And Leffler quotes Patrick O'Brien: " 'Foucault's
study of culture is a history with beginnings but no causes.'" Leffler does not
11 Roger J. Bresnahan, "Islands in Our Minds: The Pacific Ocean in the American Literary
Imagination," in Cohen, Reflections on Orientalism, 5; Nathan Citino, letter to author, July 21, 1998.
12 Said, Orientalism, 259.
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mention Said, but insofar as Said employs Foucauldian analysis in his work, the
criticism could apply to him as well."
If most historians continue to believe that establishing the cause of things is a
meaningful part of their enterprise, even more insistently do diplomatic historians
hold to this principle. That is because so much is at stake: most scholars of U.S.
foreign policy are interested in expansionism, imperialism, and ultimately war.
Given the field of analysis, the dismissal of cause seems irresponsible, for people
should try to understand what causes imperialism and war, and where power has
such solemn consequences it seems trivial to equate it with knowledge. Power, say
diplomatic historians, is economic and military superiority, not narrative authority.
Imperialism is not just an attitude. War is not preeminently a discourse.
Then there is Said's implication that alien subjects resist analysis by Westerners.
As unsettling as this possibility must be to historians generally, it is particularly
galling to diplomatic historians. For years, they have been scolded for ignoring
other countries in their relations with the United States. Most notorious was
Charles S. Maier's charge: "Narrowly cast inquiries, parochial perspectives, and
unfamiliarity with foreign languages have limited ... too many works" in the field.
Now twenty years old, Maier's criticism still stings. Underlying it seems to lurk an
accusation that diplomatic historians are lazy, infatuated with American power, and
racially insensitive. Thus aroused, diplomatic historians dusted off their language
primers, flew to France, Guatemala, or the Philippines to labor in government
archives, and began listening more closely to the voices of subalterns so as to give
their accounts dimension and depth. Could it have been for naught? Is it really true
that no matter how hard U.S. foreign relations specialists work to understand
others, their efforts will be rebuffed, either because others do not wish to be known
or because the task is culturally untenable? Most diplomatic historians will resist
this conclusion, and if it is associated with Said they are likely to resist him, toO.14
There is one more reason why diplomatic historians in particular might reject
Said: they may be uncomfortable with his politics. Said has always stated candidly
his belief that intellectuals should have public, political commitments that inform
their scholarship. He believes that Zionism systematically oppresses Arabs. Zionism is modern Orientalism, embodied in Israel and backed by the U.S. government.
Said joined the Palestine National Council in 1977; he resigned in 1991 because he
felt that the Palestine Liberation Organization "had, by entering the Madrid
[negotiation] process, in fact subordinated itself to the U.S. and Israel." Said does
not endorse violence against Israel. He has long called the state by its name-the
term "Zionist entity," he said, was "silly"-has urged a political solution to the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and has met frequently, starting long before it was
fashionable, with Israelis and American Jews. Yet he sees no real difference
between the Israeli Labor and Likud parties, and he deplored the Washington
13
Melvyn P. Leffler, "New Approaches, Old Interpretations, and Prospective Reconfigurations, "
Diplomatic History 19 (Spring 1995): 180-81.
14 Charles S. Maier, "Marking Time: The Historiography of International Relations," in Michael
Kammen, ed., The Past before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States (Ithaca, N.Y.,
1980),355-56. See the responses to Maier's essay by Michael H. Hunt, Iriye, Walter LaFeber, Leffler,
Robert D. Schulzinger, and Joan Hoff Wilson, in Diplomatic History 5 (Fall 1981): 353-82.
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signing of the Middle East "Declaration of Principles" in 1993 as "tawdry," with
Yasir Arafat exhibiting "a kind of 'nigger mentality.' "15
American diplomatic historians probably know what Said thinks about Middle
Eastern politics. Perhaps they read Bernard Lewis's attack on Orientalism in the
New York Review of Books, or Leon Wieseltier's in the New Republic, which referred
to Palestinians as "feral" and the PLO as "Arafat and his pack." Said himself has
published articles in the Nation and Harper's and op-ed pieces in the New York
Times. Foreign relations historians have a particular interest in current events, and
I suspect follow closely news from the Middle East. Still, it would be difficult to
prove that the neglect of Orientalism by diplomatic historians is politically
motivated. My guess is that the other reasons I have adduced are sufficient to
explain the apparent inattention to Said's work, and that a poll of the SHAFR
membership would in fact reveal a certain amount of sympathy for Said's views on
the Middle East,16
AND YET, HAVING SHOWN THE ABSENCE OF SAID from diplomatic historians' footnotes,
and having explained why he is not cited more often, I would nevertheless
emphasize that Said, cited or not, has had some influence on the field, and suggest
that there exist opportunities to employ his insights further. There has been, in
other words, Saidism without Said, and there may yet be a good deal more.
First, there are signs that diplomatic historians are reflecting (at least) on the
utility of critical theory to explain U.S. policy decisions and, more pointedly, to
challenge on a theoretical basis periodic calls within the field for a new "synthesis."
Emily Rosenberg has written that "critical theory sees claims to universality and to
total visions as deceptive"-language reminiscent of Said's critique of Orientalist
discourse as "essentializing" and "totalizing." Anders Stephanson and Frank
Ninkovich have also used critical theory, in different ways, in their work on George
F. Kennan (Stephanson) and President Woodrow Wilson's foreign policy and its
legatees (Ninkovich). Like Said, Frank Costigliola argues that language is powerful
and must be carefully examined; he makes his point by analyzing the prose used by
Kennan in his famous "Long Telegram," sent to the State Department from
Moscow in 1946. What one says or writes, and how one says or writes it, makes a
difference. 17
The infrequency with which diplomatic historians cite Said makes his paternity of
their ideas difficult to establish. It may be that foreign relations specialists get their
postmodern ideas from others: Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, or even Ni15 Nubar Hovsepian, "Connections with Palestine," in Michael Sprinker, ed., Edward Said: A Critical
Reader (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 8-9; Said, Pen and the Sword, 27-28, 95-96, 102-03, 164-65.
16 Review of Orientalism by Leon Wieseltier, New Republic 180 (April 7, 1979): 29; Michael Sprinker,
"Introduction" to Sprinker, Edward Said, 1.
17 Rosenberg, "Revisiting Dollar Diplomacy," 156; Anders Stephanson, Kennan and the Art of
Foreign Policy (Cambridge, Mass., 1989); Frank Ninkovich, "Interests and Discourse in Diplomatic
History," Diplomatic History 13 (Spring 1989): 135-61; Ninkovich, Modernity and Power:A History of the
Domino Theory in the Twentieth Century (Chicago, 1994); Frank Costigliola, '''Unceasing Pressure for
Penetration': Gender, Pathology, and Emotion in George Kennan's Formation of the Cold War,"
Journal of American History 83 (March 1997): 1309-39; Costigliola, "The Nuclear Family: Tropes of
Gender and Pathology in the Western Alliance," Diplomatic History 21 (Spring 1997): 163-83.
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etzsche, and their American interpreters. But implicit in their interest in Said's
methodology are studies that employ sources such as novels, films, plays, and
travelers' accounts to describe the ideas that shaped or inflected U.S. foreign policy.
Diplomatic historians are neither naive nor reactionary. They increasingly recognize that realms of culture and politics, attitudes and behaviors, are related in
important ways and are at least mutually constitutive. The "Foreign Affairs" essay
by Rosenberg cited earlier, Walter L. Hixson's" 'Red Storm Rising': Tom Clancy
Novels and the Cult of National Security" (in which Hixson quotes former
Vice-President Dan Quayle saying of the thrillers, "They're not just novels. They're
read as the real thing"), and an article by Robert Dean showing how the discourse
of American manhood affected President John F. Kennedy's creation of foreign
policy-all take seriously the idea that makers of U.S. diplomacy are subjects of
culture, not just policy wonks who shed their images of others like raincoats at the
office door. Rather than equating literary and more traditional diplomatic sources,
foreign relations historians analyze popular culture in order to examine the society
out of which diplomats emerge. John Dower has shown that American and
Japanese racial stereotypes of each other exacerbated the brutality of the Pacific
War. Harold Isaacs's classic study of American images of China and India suggests,
for example, that Americans failed to anticipate a Chinese attack in Korea in 1950
in part because they underestimated Chinese military capabilities-a high-ranking
Eisenhower administration official said: "I was brought up to think the Chinese
couldn't handle a machine ... [S]uddenly, the Chinese are flying jets!"-and that
American diplomats leaned away from India and toward Pakistan during the 1950s
because they viewed Hinduism as effeminate, passive, and indecisive and Islam as
manly, energetic, and tough-minded in the face of the Communist threat."
A second indication of Saidism in diplomatic history is the growing interest in
U.S.-Mideast relations as a research field. It is not an empirical judgment, but my
impression is that foreign relations historians who are interested in the so-called
Third World have shifted their attention from Southeast Asia to the Middle East.
As they arrive in the region, they encounter Said. Some dismiss him, content to
concentrate on the Cold War and the politics of oil, subjects they think are
insusceptible to cultural analysis. Others take him cautiously into account. In a
historiographical essay concerning U.S. relations with the Middle East since 1945,
Douglas Little noted that it was "possible to explain ... U.S. policies in terms of oil,
containment, the hard calculus of national interest. Yet something more intangible
seems to have been at work as well, something that might be called 'American
orientalism.'" Mary Ann Heiss mentions Orientalism in her book on U.S.-Iran
relations in the early 1950s, writing that Anglo-American policymakers "used" it in
their dealings with Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq. Michelle Mart embraces
Said more fully when she traces American images of Israel from 1948 to 1960,
18 Rosenberg, "'Foreign Affairs' after World War II"; Walter L. Hixson, "'Red Storm Rising': Tom
Clancy Novels and the Cult of National Security," Diplomatic History 17 (Fall 1993): 599-613; Robert
D. Dean, "Masculinity as Ideology: John F. Kennedy and the Domestic Politics of Foreign Policy,"
Diplomatic History 22 (Winter 1998): 21-62; John W. Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the
Pacific War (New York, 1986); Harold R. Isaacs, Scratches on Our Minds: American Views of China and
India (New York, 1958); and my retrospective review of Scratches in Reviews in American History 24
(March 1996): 177-88.
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although it is Culture and Imperialism she endorses for revealing "the relevance of
cultural analysis for the study of foreign policy." I am tempted to say that Said's
impact on the subfield can be described not as cause and effect but as discursive
formation; Saidism is an attitude that has prepared historians to write about
U.S.-Mideast relations.'?
Recall that many diplomatic historians, while critical of the American empire,
make claims for its uniqueness. There is something to these claims; no two empires
are exactly alike. Yet it seems to me that Said's association of the American empire
with its European progenitors, though too mechanistic, has advantages over the
exceptionalist thesis. There is a morphology of imperialism. Scholars as ideologically diverse as Thomas J. McCormick, John Lewis Gaddis, and Paul Kennedy have
usefully compared the American empire with earlier, failed examples of the genre.
Said compels us to think through time about the experience of Western empires in
Asia. For instance: following the advent of independence in India and Pakistan in
1947, the British sought American help to stabilize South Asia. Americans were
educated about the region by British scholars and diplomats. As the United States
became the chief economic supporter of India and the leading supplier of arms to
Pakistan, it acted in some ways as Great Britain had-favoring Muslims over
Hindus, for example. In some ways, however, the Americans behaved as the British
had not, avoiding direct political control of India and discouraging state-run
enterprise in its competition with the private sector. A mutant strain of Orientalist
thinking flourished within the American empire, but it was an Orientalism
nonetheless.w
I noted earlier that Said tends to mystify subjects, condemning Orientalism
while nevertheless refusing to say what might take its place. Yet the churlishness
of Said's response to the earnest student who wished to understand the "Orient"
cannot overwhelm the more forceful vector of Said's work, which is both
optimistic and humane. The single most important thing Orientalism did for U.S.
diplomatic historians, whether they acknowledge it or not, was to demand that
they-that all scholars-heed the voices of subalterns when they talked back to
power. By 1978, this was old hat for social historians, but for foreign relations
specialists, it was something of a revelation. Said, who knows a good deal about
classical music, urges us (in Culture and Imperialism) to read the "cultural
archive ... not univocally but contrapuntally, with a simultaneous awareness
both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories
against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts."21 How
to read or listen remains a bit obscure, given the resistance of subjects to
analysis, the limitations of language, and the perils of Orientalist misrepresentation. In the end, however, suitably warned, we are invited to try, to render
19 Douglas Little, "Gideon's Band: America and the Middle East since 1945," Diplomatic History 18
(Fall 1994): 538; Heiss, Empire and Nationhood, 4; Michelle Mart, "Tough Guys and American Cold
War Policy: Images of Israel, 1948-1960," Diplomatic History 20 (Summer 1996): 358. Little does not
cite Said in "His Finest Hour? Eisenhower, Lebanon, and the 1958 Middle East Crisis," Diplomatic
History 20 (Winter 1996): 27-54.
20 Thomas J. McCormick, America's Half-Century: United States Foreign Policy in the Cold War
(Baltimore, Md., 1989); Gaddis, "New Conceptual Approaches," 415-17; Paul Kennedy, The Rise and
Fall of the Great Powers (New York, 1987).
21 Said, Culture and Imperialism, 51. Said is classical music critic for the Nation.
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relations between nations as duets-or choruses-rather than solos. Diplomatic
historians have accepted this invitation with increasing enthusiasm and selfconfidence. Listening with what I think is a keen sensitivity to the voices of
others, historians have generated a significant body of contrapuntal work. A
long list of such scholarship would be out of place here, but one thinks of writing
by Michael Hunt and Chen Jian on China; Nancy Bernkopf Tucker oil Taiwan
and Hong Kong; Vladislav Zubok, Constantine Pleshakov, and David Engerman
on the Soviet Union; Iriye and Dower on Japan; Bruce Cumings and William
Stueck on Korea; Mark Bradley and Robert Brigham on Vietnam; Little, Heiss,
and Mart on the Middle East-and that's just the former Soviet Union and
Asia. 22
There is a counterpoint to the counterpoint. Even as Said insists that Western
scholars take others seriously, his analysis in Orientalism reminds us that our
others are to a large extent reflections of ourselves. We project onto others our
hopes and fears; others become repositories of characteristics we cannot abide
in ourselves because they are shameful or revolting. This suggests, ironically,
that the new internationalism in diplomatic history must be predicated on a
closer examination of who we are, as Westerners and Americans. There is an
honored tradition in the field of exploring the domestic sources of American
foreign relations. Samuel Flagg Bemis, one of the founders of the field, stressed
the exceptionalism of the American experience, distinguished as it was by the
luxury of physical isolation and "the fundamental principles and virtues of
American liberty and freedom that come from our Anglo-Saxon background."
Fred Harvey Harrington, William Appleman Williams, and the revisionist
historians they helped train focused on the felt need of American elites to
secure overseas markets, driven by the maddening propensity of the American
economy to fall into depression. Said, of course, rejects the exceptionalist thesis;
and, while his reading of the American empire is consistent with that of the
revisionists, that is not his primary contribution. The creation of the self, out of
which comes the representation of the other, can be seen as a psychological and
cultural phenomenon firmly rooted in American historical development. It is the
basis for a dialogue about national identity, which ought to be conjoined to
similar dialogues going on in other nations. To its understanding, U.S. historians
of all affiliations have a great deal to contribute.P
22 Michael H. Hunt, The Making of a Special Relationship: The United States and China to 1914 (New
York, 1983); Chen Jian, China's Road to the Korean War: The Making of the Sino-American
Confrontation (New York, 1994); Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the United States,
1945-1992: Uncertain Friendships (New York, 1994); Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov,
Inside the Kremlin's Cold War: From Stalin to Khruschev (Cambridge, Mass., 1996); David C. Engerman,
"America, Russia, and the Romance of Economic Development" (PhD dissertation, University of
California, Berkeley, 1998); Akira Iriye, Power and Culture: The Japanese-American War, 1941-1945
(Cambridge, Mass., 1981); Dower, War without Mercy; Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War,
2 vols. (Princeton, N.J., 1981, 1990); William Stueck, The Korean War: An International History
(Princeton, 1995); Mark Bradley and Robert K. Brigham, Vietnamese Archives and Scholarship on the
Cold War Period: Two Reports (Washington, D.C., 1993); and Brigham, Guerrilla Diplomacy: The NLF's
Foreign Relations and the Vietnam War (Ithaca, N.Y., 1998).
23 Gaddis Smith, "The Two Worlds of Samuel Flagg Bemis," Diplomatic History 9 (Fall 1985): 299.
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Andrew J. Rotter is a professor of history at Colgate University. He is the
author of The Path to Vietnam: Origins of the American Commitment to
Southeast Asia (1987) and a number of articles and reviews on the Vietnam
War, and editor of Light at the End of the Tunnel: A Vietnam War Anthology
(revised edition, 1999). Lately, his work has explored the intersection of
cultural and diplomatic history. His recent writing includes "Feeding Beggars:
Class, Caste, and Status in Indo-US Relations, 1947-1964," in Christian G.
Appy, editor, Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of United States
Imperialism, 1945-1966 (2000), "Christians, Muslims, and Hindus: Religion
and US-South Asia Relations, 1947-1954" (forthcoming in Diplomatic History,
2000), and Comrades at Odds: The United States and India, 1947-1964
(forthcoming, 2000).
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