All scholarly knowledge production is shaped by the scholar’s political circumstances.
Evidence
I do not want to press all this any further on general theoretical grounds: it seems to me that the value and credibility of my case can be demonstrated by being much more specific, in the way, for example, Noam Chomsky has studied the instrumental connection between the Vietnam War and the notion of objective scholarship as it was applied to cover state-sponsored military research. Now because Britain, France, and recently the United States are imperial powers, their political societies impart to their civil societies a sense of urgency, a direct political infusion as it were, where and whenever matters pertaining to their imperial interests abroad are concerned. … For if it is true that no production of knowledge in the human sciences can ever ignore or disclaim its author’s involvement as a human subject in his own circumstances, then it must also be true that for a European or American studying the Orient there can be no disclaiming the main circumstances of his actuality: that he comes up against the Orient as a European or American first, as an individual second. And to be a European or an American in such a situation is by no means an inert fact. It meant and means being aware, however dimly, that one belongs to a power with definite interests in the Orient, and more important, that one belongs to a part of the earth with a definite history of involvement in the Orient almost since the time of Homer. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 70
Categorization
- XREF: The claim that imperial powers infuse political urgency into civil society directly scaffolds later Islamophobia readings built on Said — this is the core mechanism by which state interests reach academic knowledge production.
- DEFINE: Establishes the key move of Orientalism: that all knowledge in the human sciences bears the author’s situatedness, so the study of the Orient is unavoidably political.
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 70