American empire inherited and reformulated European Orientalism after World War II

Evidence

Since World War II, and more noticeably after each of the Arab-Israeli wars, the Arab Muslim has become a figure in American popular culture, even as in the academic world, in the policy planner’s world, and in the world of business very serious attention is being paid the Arab. This symbolizes a major change in the international configuration of forces. France and Britain no longer occupy center stage in world politics; the American imperium has displaced them. A vast web of interests now links all parts of the former colonial world to the United States, just as a proliferation of academic subspecialties divides (and yet connects) all the former philological and European-based disciplines like Orientalism. The area specialist, as he is now called, lays claims to regional expertise, which is put at the service of government or business or both. The massive, quasi-material knowledge stored in the annals of modern European Orientalism—as recorded, for example, in Jules Mohl’s nineteenth-century logbook of the field—has been dissolved and released into new forms. A wide variety of hybrid representations of the Orient now roam the culture. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 724

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Foucault’s power-knowledge and to later Islamophobia readings on the policy-academia nexus; also dovetails with the reader’s Module 2 scaffold on how expertise is co-opted by state power. — connects to: Orientalism rose as colonial-control ideology under British capitalist imperialism; European Orientalist scholars transplanted their paradigm to US universities as imperial power shifted — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 254; American exceptionalism repackaged empire because it could not inherit old imperial language (+7 more)
• DEFINE: Introduces the ‘area specialist’ as the post-war successor to the Orientalist, whose regional expertise serves government and business.
• SEED: The transformation of 19th-century Orientalism into the Cold War ‘area studies’ complex is a strong essay angle: how academic knowledge production gets absorbed by the national security state.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 724