Orientalism as colonial knowledge has been replaced by new propaganda

Evidence

In chapter after chapter, Ibn Warraq takes a perverse pleasure in recounting the ugliest European assertions about Islam. Dante, Hobbes, Voltaire, Hume, Gibbon, and Carlyle are paraded one after the other. Why I Am Not a Muslim is not, however, a merely malicious resuscitation of old-fashioned Orientalist knowledge production; the discipline had already succumbed under the weight of its racist and positivist incoherence and from the concurrent rise of the epistemic and hermeneutic revolutions, long before Said delivered his magnificent coup de grace. The colonial project is no longer operative; the political economy of the capital that once necessitated Orientalism as a system of colonial knowledge has long since shifted gear to a new propaganda machinery. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 476

Categorization

• XREF: This shift from colonial knowledge-production to propaganda machinery parallels the reader’s notes on Communication as Culture about press freedom and the public sphere being remade by new information regimes.

Related

• Said’s Orientalism overshadowed the sociology-of-knowledge tradition it drew on (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalism reduced multifaceted Muslim societies to a single doctrinal Islam (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalist texts functioned as blueprints for material re-creation, not just misrepresentation (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalism persists by being internalized by the Orient itself and by new imperialism (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalism is a discourse, not a mirror of imperial political power (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalist scholarship mounted political and ideological edges rather than neutral knowledge (similarity 0.82)
• Arab and Islamic studies resisted the 1960s scholarly revolutions that revised other area studies (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalism operates as a discourse with material institutional support (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalism remains a distinctly racial project anchored in imperial white supremacy (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalism operates as a racial project serving white supremacist empire. (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalism is a microcosm of a modernity that structurally requires colonialism and genocide. (similarity 0.81)
• Native informers have internalized Orientalist discourse, making expert knowledge unnecessary. (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalist scholarship supplied the knowledge base that justified colonial rule (similarity 0.81)
• Generalizing knowledge-power critique would erase Orientalism’s special status (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalism was a project of power and culture, not merely an academic enterprise (similarity 0.80)