A critique’s productive uptake depends on that polity’s political and democratic conditions

Evidence

The difference between Arab and other responses to Orientalism is, I think, an accurate indication of how decades of loss, frustration, and the absence of democracy have affected intellectual and cultural life in the Arab region. I intended my book as part of a pre-existing current of thought whose purpose was to liberate intellectuals from the shackles of systems such as Orientalism: I wanted readers to make use of my work so they might then produce new studies of their own that would illuminate the historical experience of Arabs and others in a generous, enabling mode. That certainly happened in Europe, the United States, Australia, the Indian subcontinent, the Caribbean, Ireland, Latin America, and parts of Africa. The invigorated study of Africanist and Indological discourses; the analyses of subaltern history; the reconfiguration of post-colonial anthropology, political science, art history, literary criticism, musicology, in addition to the vast new developments in feminist and minority discourses—to all these, I am pleased and flattered that Orientalism often made a difference. That does not seem to have been the case (insofar as I can judge it) in the Arab world, where, partly because my work is correctly perceived as Eurocentric in its texts, and partly because, as Musallam says, the battle for cultural survival is too engrossing, books like mine are interpreted less usefully, productively speaking, and more as defensive gestures either for or against the “West.” — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 854

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the scaffold for later Islamophobia readings: how the Arab world’s own reception of critical theory is shaped by the absence of democracy — the political conditions of intellectual uptake.
• SEED: Angle for an essay: why postcolonial critique flourishes in Western academies but reads as defensive gesture in the Arab region — the political economy of theory’s travels.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 854