Orientalism’s claim to scholarly attention rests on its uniqueness among fields

Evidence

If discourse about Orientalism, as Said has made it into a common academic topic, is to have any meaning or significance, it must be something that is neither commonplace nor ordinary. In other words, for the discourse on Orientalism to be worthy of any special attention, much less the locus of vehement controversies, Orientalism must be a singularly important phenomenon that can be isolated and identified as having particularly distinctive or unique characteristics. For if Orientalism turns out to be just another scholarly tradition or just another field of study, one among many like it, and with more or less the same performative and destructive effects, then we might find it unwarranted that it should have been segregated for the kind of analytical and political attention that it has thus far received. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 96

Categorization

• QUESTION: This is a genuinely testable challenge: does Orientalism differ in kind, not just degree, from other area-specialty fields born in the same era?