Orientalism divides into a fixed unconscious core and changeable surface views
Evidence
The distinction I am making is really between an almost unconscious (and certainly an untouchable) positivity, which I shall call latent Orientalism, and the various stated views about Oriental society, languages, literatures, history, sociology, and so forth, which I shall call manifest Orientalism. Whatever change occurs in knowledge of the Orient is found almost exclusively in manifest Orientalism; the unanimity, stability, and durability of latent Orientalism are more or less constant. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 514
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
- DEFINE: Defines the central latent/manifest distinction that anchors the whole chapter.
- XREF: Connects to Gramsci’s distinction between structure and superstructure/hegemony in the critical-theory toolkit.
Related
- Latent Orientalism is an unchanging unconscious baseline while manifest Orientalism absorbs all change (similarity 0.95)
- Orientalism’s essentialism hides both historical change and the Orientalist’s interests (similarity 0.87)
- Orientalism’s scientific pretense requires positing a permanent, unchanging Orient (similarity 0.87)
- Orientalism fixes the Oriental as passive object while the Orientalist holds interpretive power (similarity 0.86)
- Orientalism operates as a discourse with material institutional support (similarity 0.85)
- Orientalism regularizes how the Orient is taught and administered (similarity 0.85)
- There has never been a pure or nonmaterial form of the Orient (similarity 0.85)
- Orientalism is only the visible tip of a larger modern structure. (similarity 0.85)
- Orientalism rests on a fixed distinction between Western superiority and Oriental inferiority (similarity 0.85)
- Orientalism’s harm lies in its thought structure, not its content’s positivity (similarity 0.85)
- Orientalist writing is pre-eminently a visual regime of expert and beholding self. (similarity 0.85)
- Orientalism must be examined at both the general and the individual level (similarity 0.85)
- Orientalism functions as a systemic structure embedded in the modern project (similarity 0.85)
- Orientalism’s intent was critique, not affirmation of antithetical identities (similarity 0.85)
- Orientalist scholarship is inseparable from imperial power and its orthodox attitudes (similarity 0.85)