Europe’s identity was constructed against the Orient as its surrogate self

Evidence

It also tries to show that European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 55

My contention is that without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period. Moreover, so authoritative a position did Orientalism have that I believe no one writing, thinking, or acting on the Orient could do so without taking account of the limitations on thought and action imposed by Orientalism. In brief, because of Orientalism, the Orient was not (and is not) a free subject of thought and action. This is not to say that Orientalism unilaterally determines what can be said about the Orient, but that it is the whole network of interests inevitably brought to bear on (and therefore always involved in) any occasion when that peculiar entity “the Orient” is in question.… This book … tries to show that European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 594

Categorization

• XREF: Directly prefigures the construction-of-the-Other mechanism central to later Islamophobia readings.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that European selfhood was constituted through negation of the Orient — ‘surrogate and underground self’ — is a paradigmatic mechanism for how colonized peoples become the shadow-self against which the West defines itself, dense enough to underwrite a whole field.
• DEFINE: Defines Orientalism’s core thesis: a discourse that both produces and constrains its object, not merely describes it.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 55; Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity…, 594