Cold War-era policymakers reframed Oriental studies as an instrument of geopolitical management.

Evidence

In 1951, for instance, he contributed an essay to a book significantly entitled The Near East and the Great Powers, in which he tried to explain the need for an expansion in Anglo-American programs of Oriental studies: … the whole situation of the Western countries in regard to the countries of Asia and Africa has changed. We can no longer rely on that factor of prestige which seemed to play a large part in prewar thinking, neither can we any longer expect the peoples of Asia and Africa or of Eastern Europe to come to us and learn from us, while we sit back. We have to learn about them so that we can learn to work with them in a relationship that is closer to terms of mutuality. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 701

Categorization

• XREF: The prestige-to-mutuality shift in colonial knowledge production prefigures the liberal humanitarian framing later Islamophobia critiques expose — connects to Said’s larger claim that even reformulated ‘mutuality’ stays instrumentally self-serving. — connects to: Foundations and state built area studies to serve Cold War empire — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 240; Cold War-era editors framed emerging markets through liberal Western lenses — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 167
• SEED: Angle: how ‘learning about them’ discourse in 1951 institutionalized the surveillant knowledge economy of area studies that persists in counterterrorism-era funding.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 701