Culture-clash arguments foreclose any possibility of progress outside the West.

Evidence

In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said reminds us what such culture-clash explanations accomplish. Considering Orientalist scholar Bernard Lewis’s argument that expanding the Western literature curriculum to include non-Western works would soon take us down the path of slavery, polygamy, and child marriage, Said notes that, their comic dimensions notwithstanding, Lewis’s arguments, predicated as they are on ‘a highly inflated sense of Western exclusivity in cultural accomplishment,’ but also reflecting ‘a tremendously limited, almost hysterically antagonistic view of the rest of the world,’ foreclose ‘the possibility that any advance over tyranny and barbarism could or did occur outside the West.’ We end up with ‘a murderous imperial contest’ that has the effect of driving the non-West ‘into a violent rage or, with equally unedifying consequences, into boasting about the achievements of non-Western cultures.’ The actual conditions of arranged and cousin marriages, or any other patriarchal practices, remain completely unexamined when we engage in imperial contests. Since ‘all roads lead to the bazaar,’ then such details are unnecessary. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 269

Categorization

• XREF: Directly engages Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism framework on Orientalism’s closed view of the non-West.
• SHARE: The phrase ‘all roads lead to the bazaar’ as the Orientalist’s dismissal of empirical detail is a sharp formulation a colleague studying Orientalist discourse would enjoy.