Saiward Pharr/WRKF Dr. Suzanne Marchand, LSU History Prof. and author of "German Orientalism and the Age of Empire"

Edward Said changed the study of history when he published "Orientalism," in 1978. Scholars have just recently begun to challenge Said's theories, including Dr. Suzanne Marchand, a History professor at Louisiana State University.

Marchand's book, "German Orientalism and the Age of Empire," has won the American Historical Association's George L. Mosse Prize and the American Library Association put the book on its "Outstanding Academic Titles of 2010" list.

Listen to the Interview

Dr. Marchand joined WRKF's Saiward Pharr in studio to discuss her work.

PHARR: I have to ask you for a brief laymen's introduction to Orientalism.

MARCHAND: Orientalism means many things. The way that Edward Said defined Orientalism in his classic 1978 book was as a general discourse about the Orient produced in the West. That incorporated all sorts of things from the designs of paintings to classical scholarship on the Orient to novels about the Orient. My view is that that's a much too broad category, and what was really the definition of Orientalism for most people was the study of Oriental languages. So, mine is a more modest definition of Orientalism. It's linked to some of those other aspects, but it's specifically an academic and linguistic definition.

PHARR: And in the process of that, one of the things you end up doing is tracing how the modern study of the humanities at the university ends up forming, and you start with people who identify themselves as Orientalists, as rabbis, as priests, as linguists in some cases studying particular languages, all the way through the humanities now. What have you learned about the modern university?

MARCHAND: First of all, it has really reminded me that the foundation of the humanities is the study of languages. It's the study of classical languages and of Oriental languages, the most important of which, for centuries, was Hebrew in order to understand, for Christians, the Old Testament and, for Jews, the sacred scriptures. So, language formed so much of what humanistic knowledge was for centuries and centuries. It's formed us in so many deep ways - this is what going back to the source is about, is understanding the language in which things are written.

And now, historians do this all the time by creating context. We really have a powerful set of tools assembled now in the modern university to do this kind of work. To understand enormous numbers of diverse cultures that we couldn't understand before because we now have scholars who understand Chinese, who understand ancient Persian, who understand - in deep and important ways - how to read Cuneiform texts. This was something for many centuries that Europeans didn't have and we had to diversify and grow and develop these skills so that now we can really understand the breadth of the human experience.

PHARR: That's one of the reasons I think you may have gotten so much attention for this book, is that you do challenge Said on that. He took on the idea that the West took all of this knowledge and said, "I hold all this power and it is now mine. It's mine to hold alone." And you say, "Yeah, no, not so much." You say, while power can be used in a manipulative fashion, you don't necessarily cotton to the idea yourself. And I've not really heard many academics say that idea out right. I think that's something new.

MARCHAND: I think it was a breakthrough for me to even really make this discovery myself. To really decide this understanding we have of the relationships between power and knowledge over-emphasizes the negative power aspects of learning and of knowledge. Not all power is used for collaborationist purposes.

All the time we use knowledge to challenge authority, or we use knowledge to appreciate beauty, or we use our knowledge to communicate with people across cultural divides. We need to value this as part of modern humanistic scholarship and of what the humanities can contribute to the modern world. And we need to say forthrightly, that we can do this in a way that does not simply, sort of, entangle us in power relations, but in fact, may liberate us from some forces of authority that perhaps don't have any knowledge on these subjects.

PHARR: And I would be remiss if I didn't ask you about the current situation in the Middle East, even though that is admittedly outside of the scope of your-of this book and generally - of your studies. But I think there are some of the colonial set ups that create the situation currently in the Middle East, and one of the quotes in your book, in talking about J.D. Michaelis (pronunciation corrected by Marchand) - pardon my German - a scholar of Hebraic law, the quote is: "...texts were strongly preferred to living people and post-Christian histories of the Orients were simply stories of decline." I found that an interesting idea to apply from, admittedly out of context from your book, but to apply to what's going on now.

MARCHAND: There are very strong ways in which the popular conception of the Orient is still very much shaped by the ancient world and the Bible. It's striking to me how many reference points we still draw from those ancient times. I think that's not true any longer for academics, and academic history has - certainly since the 1920s - begun to really investigate modern periods and evaluate those regimes and overturn those conceptions.

But there has always been, and probably will always be, a kind of lag between popular and academic discourse. And there are ways in which those kinds of popular conceptions tend to be the ones that are followed by political leaders and diplomats, rather than by academics. This is, I think, one of the things that also - an insight that led me to write my introduction the way I did - is to note the discrepancy between what often leaders say about the Orient, or the Middle East, and what academics say. There are various different kinds of things said - no one speaks with the same voice; we don't all think the same thing about that place that is generally known as the Orient.

We also still, I think in the popular conception, tend to think of it in religious terms. It is the land of religion or the home of spirituality or something of that sort, and we don't often take very seriously its material conditions, its technological innovations and so on. So it's still a problem meshing the popular conception and where academics' specialized research has taken us.

You can find more information about "German Orientalism and the Age of Empire" from its publisher, Cambridge University Press.