Nineteenth-century Orientalism created a professional terminology that dominated all discourse on the Orient

Evidence

In part, of course, Marx was concerned with vindicating his own theses on socio-economic revolution; but in part also he seems to have had easy resource to a massed body of writing, both internally consolidated by Orientalism and put forward by it beyond the field, that controlled any statement made about the Orient. In Chapter One I tried to show how this control had had a general cultural history in Europe since antiquity; in this chapter my concern has been to show how in the nineteenth century a modern professional terminology and practice were created whose existence dominated discourse about the Orient, whether by Orientalists or non-Orientalists. Sacy and Renan were instances of the way Orientalism fashioned, respectively, a body of texts and a philologically rooted process by which the Orient took on a discursive identity that made it unequal with the West. In using Marx as the case by which a non-Orientalist’s human engagements were first dissolved, then usurped by Orientalist generalizations, we find ourselves having to consider the process of lexicographical and institutional consolidation peculiar to Orientalism. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 399

Categorization

• XREF: This is the scaffolding concept — a professional terminology whose authority extends beyond its own practitioners (Orientalists to non-Orientalists) — that later Islamophobia readings build on when arguing how expert discourse colonizes public speech. Sacy/Renan pairing is the canonical example to carry forward. — connects to: Orientalism regularizes how the Orient is taught and administered; Orientalism is a corporate discourse that produces the Orient — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 55; The Orientalist’s constructed Orient displaced the actual Orient in European discourse (+4 more)
• QUESTION: Said names Sacy (a body of texts) and Renan (a philological process) as the two nineteenth-century modes; worth pinning down exactly what distinguishes these two operations when exporting the concept.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 399

Broader Connections

• Orientalism disciplined the exotic into lexicons, codes, and clichés #expands (0.90) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 487
• Orientalism regularizes how the Orient is taught and administered #expands (0.85)
• Orientalism fixed the Orient as uniform, undeveloped, and incapable of self-definition #expands (0.85) — Chris Allen, Islamophobia, 188
• Orientalism is a corporate discourse that produces the Orient #expands (0.80) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 55
• The Orientalist’s constructed Orient displaced the actual Orient in European discourse #expands (0.80)
• For imperial discourse, knowledge of the Orient constitutes power over it #expands (0.75)
• Western scholarly discourse about the Orient was entangled with colonial domination #expands (0.75) — Green, Todd H, The Fear of Islam_ An Introduction to…, 206