Knowledge-producing disciplines were mobilized in service of imperialist worldviews

Evidence

The kind of political questions raised by Orientalism, then, are as follows: What other sorts of intellectual, aesthetic, scholarly, and cultural energies went into the making of an imperialist tradition like the Orientalist one? How did philology, lexicography, history, biology, political and economic theory, novel-writing, and lyric poetry come to the service of Orientalism’s broadly imperialist view of the world? What changes, modulations, refinements, even revolutions take place within Orientalism? What is the meaning of originality, of continuity, of individuality, in this context? How does Orientalism transmit or reproduce itself from one epoch to another? In fine, how can we treat the cultural, historical phenomenon of Orientalism as a kind of willed human work—not of mere unconditioned ratiocination—in all its historical complexity, detail, and worth without at the same time losing sight of the alliance between cultural work, political tendencies, the state, and the specific realities of domination? Governed by such concerns a humanistic study can responsibly address itself to politics and culture. But this is not to say that such a study establishes a hard-and-fast rule about the relationship between knowledge and politics. My argument is that each humanistic investigation must formulate the nature of that connection in the specific context of the study, the subject matter, and its historical circumstances. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 77

Categorization

• XREF: Establishes the core scaffolding question—how seemingly neutral scholarly fields serve imperial projects—that later Islamophobia readings will build upon. — connects to: MPS fused disciplines and professions into a transacademic knowledge machine beyond single disciplines — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 86; Metropolitan institutions assemble and control most knowledge produced about the Third World; Cold War legislation mobilized US universities to produce imperial knowledge (+2 more)
• SEED: The claim that no hard-and-fast rule governs knowledge-politics relations, only context-specific formulations, is the methodological caution later readings need to remember.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 77