Generalizing knowledge-power critique would erase Orientalism’s special status

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

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader ‘epistemic violence’ and decolonial literature (Mignolo, Grosfoguel) — the critique that modernity and coloniality are inseparable. — connects to: Orientalism’s totalizing discourse critique erases all sites of resistance and liberation; Orientalist ideas can circulate without imperial power structures; Conflating all Western knowledge production with Orientalism repeats essentialism and obscures historical specificity