Europe defined itself through a material and cultural image of the Orient

Evidence

Unlike the Americans, the French and the British—less so the Germans, Russians, Spanish, Portuguese, Italians, and Swiss—have had a long tradition of what I shall be calling Orientalism, a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western experience. The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other. In addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 52

Categorization

• DEFINE: Names Orientalism and gives its founding definition: a mode of discourse functioning as Europe’s self-defining Other.
• XREF: The ‘self defined through its Other’ mechanism directly scaffolds the construction-of-the-Other toolkit needed for later Islamophobia readings; also links to Foucault’s discourse concept. — connects to: European knowledge of the Orient assembled a restricted archive of tropes that controlled novelty; Europe’s literary repertoire of the Orient half-imagined settings and figures.; Orient studies served Europe’s needs, not Asia’s reality (+10 more)
• corroborated: 4 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 52

Broader Connections

• European identity formed through internal cohesion paired with contrast to other worlds #corroborates (0.85)
• The Orientalist’s constructed Orient displaced the actual Orient in European discourse #corroborates (0.85)
• European representation of the Orient outweighs actual Oriental lived experience #qualifies (0.80)
• Culture, not merely power, dynamically created Western interest in the Orient #expands (0.80) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 71