Conflating all Western knowledge production with Orientalism repeats essentialism and obscures historical specificity

Evidence

Of course one wonders if Said understood the “complex problem of knowledge and power” as being limited to certain phenomena, Orientalism included, because for him to generalize the problem, as it should be systematically generalized, he would have been forced to eliminate the ascription of anomaly to Orientalism alone; the anomaly would then cease to be an anomaly, and would instead be a general characteristic of Western modernity, the (original) producer of Orientalism, liberalism, materialism, and secularism. Traveling this distance was not on Said’s mind, however. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 325 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Generalizing knowledge-power critique would erase Orientalism’s special status — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 325; Non-Western elites’ self-essentializing claims intersect Orientalist knowledge in tangled ways — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 756

Broader Connections

• Generalizing knowledge-power critique would erase Orientalism’s special status #corroborates (0.95) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 325