European modernity defines itself through relation to alien past cultures.

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 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Europe defined itself through a material and cultural image of the Orient — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 52; European identity formed through internal cohesion paired with contrast to other worlds; Enlightenment thought frames tradition and modernity as opposing binary cultures.

Related

• Europe defined itself through a material and cultural image of the Orient (similarity 0.91)
• Europe’s literary repertoire of the Orient half-imagined settings and figures. (similarity 0.88)
• Europe’s doubt about Oriental novelty serves as its cultural weapon (similarity 0.86)
• Eighteenth-century comparative history confronted the Orient partly to know Europe itself (similarity 0.86)
• British imperial presence was conceived as permanently transforming the Orient (similarity 0.86)
• Modernity and Europeanness are only legible against an alien past culture. (similarity 0.84)
• European knowledge of the Orient assembled a restricted archive of tropes that controlled novelty (similarity 0.83)
• Knowledge of the Orient requires conceiving it as ruled by Europe (similarity 0.82)
• Europeans claimed to possess the Orient’s souls beyond territorial power (similarity 0.82)
• European exploration modernized knowledge but recycled old Orient-versus-Europe binaries. (similarity 0.82)
• Europe’s identity was constructed against the Orient as its surrogate self (similarity 0.82)
• Europe’s self-formation against an Other does not require an actual Orient (similarity 0.81)
• Europeans described the New World through preexisting Western conceptual categories (similarity 0.81)
• European learning was wholly Greco-Latin before Orientalist translation expanded its canon (similarity 0.81)
• Western scholarly handling turned the Orient from alien into colonial space (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Europe defined itself through a material and cultural image of the Orient #corroborates (0.85) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 52
• European identity formed through internal cohesion paired with contrast to other worlds #corroborates (0.80)
• Enlightenment thought frames tradition and modernity as opposing binary cultures. #expands (0.75)