Orientalism adapted to decolonization by rebranding itself as interdisciplinary area studies

Evidence

Eighteen years later Gibb faced an audience of English compatriots, only now he was speaking as the director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard. His topic was “Area Studies Reconsidered,” in which, among other aperçus, he agreed that “the Orient is much too important to be left to the Orientalists.” The new, or second alternative, approach open to Orientalists was being announced, just as Modern Trends exemplified the first, or traditional, approach. Gibb’s formula is well-intentioned in “Area Studies Reconsidered,” so far, of course, as the Western experts on the Orient are concerned, whose job it is to prepare students for careers “in public life and business.” What we now need, said Gibb, is the traditional Orientalist plus a good social scientist working together: between them the two will do “interdisciplinary” work. Yet the traditional Orientalist will not bring outdated knowledge to bear on the Orient; no, his expertise will serve to remind his uninitiated colleagues in area studies that “to apply the psychology and mechanics of Western political institutions to Asian or Arab situations is pure Walt Disney.” — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 299

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Documents the historical shift from classical Orientalism to ‘area studies’ — the institutional form the field takes today.
• XREF: This ‘interdisciplinarity’ that preserves Orientalist assumptions is exactly what critical Islamophobia scholarship defines itself against.

Related

• Decolonization confronted Orientalism with a politically armed Orient it could not recognize (similarity 0.85)
• Oriental studies were reframed as instruments of national postwar policy, not scholarship (similarity 0.85)
• Area-studies Orientalism erases politics, economics, and history by collapsing all Orientals into one essence (similarity 0.85)
• Orientalism’s meaning shifted after post-war deconolization critiques (similarity 0.85)
• Interwar Orientalism reframed the Orient as a cultural cure for Western provincialism (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalist scholars impose external analytical categories that Muslims themselves would not recognize (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalism’s scientific pretense requires positing a permanent, unchanging Orient (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalist scholarship privileged a monolithic textual Islam over lived human realities (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalism is a differentiated analysis, not a blanket attack on the West (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalism operates as both an academic discipline and a repository of cultural images (similarity 0.83)
• Centuries of Orientalist scholarship have functioned as domination and violence (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalist expertise erases politics, economics, and class from Oriental realities (similarity 0.83)
• Islamic Orientalism treats resistance to change as the Orient’s essential trait (similarity 0.83)
• Said defined Orientalism as scholarship tied to governing the Middle East (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalism’s essentialism hides both historical change and the Orientalist’s interests (similarity 0.83)

Broader Connections

• Oriental studies were reconceived as instruments of national policy toward postcolonial nations #expands (0.95) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 703