Actual travel to the Orient did not alter pre-formed Western prejudices.

Evidence

Kinglake’s undeservedly famous and popular work is a pathetic catalogue of pompous ethnocentrisms and tiringly nondescript accounts of the Englishman’s East. His ostensible purpose in the book is to prove that travel in the Orient is important to “moulding of your character—that is, your very identity,” but in fact this turns out to be little more than solidifying “your” anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and general all-purpose race prejudice. We are told, for instance, that the Arabian Nights is too lively and inventive a work to have been created by a “mere Oriental, who, for creative purposes, is a thing dead and dry—a mental mummy.” Although Kinglake blithely confesses to no knowledge of any Oriental language, he is not constrained by ignorance from making sweeping generalizations about the Orient, its culture, mentality, and society. Many of the attitudes he repeats are canonical, of course, but it is interesting how little the experience of actually seeing the Orient affected his opinions. Like many other travelers he is more interested in remaking himself and the Orient (dead and dry—a mental mummy) than he is in seeing what there is to be seen. Every being he encounters merely corroborates his belief that Easterners are best dealt with when intimidated, and what better instrument of intimidation than a sovereign Western ego? — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 493

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Directly anticipates the later argument that lived experience is subordinated to the Orientalist textual/doxastic grid — a key mechanism for the Islamophobia readings.

Related

• Actual travel experience leaves Orientalist preconceptions entirely undisturbed (similarity 0.92)
• Orientalist travel writing solidifies race prejudice rather than conveying knowledge (similarity 0.89)
• Orientalism generated a free-floating mythology detached from actual Orientals (similarity 0.84)
• The Orient served Western travelers as a stage for their own self-creation. (similarity 0.83)
• The pre-existing Orientalist archive blocks the traveler’s fresh experience of the Orient (similarity 0.82)
• Western cultural discourse about the Orient is a formidable structure of domination. (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalism reflects the producing culture rather than its putative object (similarity 0.82)
• Even putatively impartial scientific Orientalism remains an egoistic interpretive act that rebuilds its object. (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalist expertise erases politics, economics, and class from Oriental realities (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalist travelers consistently subordinated observed reality to literary templates. (similarity 0.81)
• The Orient re-enters Western textuality after lived experience fails to match texts. (similarity 0.81)
• Said’s liberalism foreclosed any possibility that the Orient could instruct the West (similarity 0.81)
• Travel and imaginative literature helped build Orientalist discourse (similarity 0.80)
• Orientalism is studied via its internal consistency, not its correspondence to a real Orient (similarity 0.80)
• Western observers experience the Orient as spectacle barred from full participation (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Travelers’ firsthand experience could not overturn their Orientalist fantasies #corroborates (0.95) — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 45