Orientalism fixes the Oriental as passive object while the Orientalist holds interpretive power

Evidence

One can explain such statements by recognizing that a still more implicit and powerful difference posited by the Orientalist as against the Oriental is that the former writes about, whereas the latter is written about. For the latter, passivity is the presumed role; for the former, the power to observe, study, and so forth; as Roland Barthes has said, a myth (and its perpetuators) can invent itself (themselves) ceaselessly. The Oriental is given as fixed, stable, in need of investigation, in need even of knowledge about himself. No dialectic is either desired or allowed. There is a source of information (the Oriental) and a source of knowledge (the Orientalist), in short, a writer and a subject matter otherwise inert. The relationship between the two is radically a matter of power, for which there are numerous images. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 779

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the core writer/subject-matter power asymmetry built into the Orientalist position.
• XREF: Connects directly to Barthes on myth and to later postcolonial theory on ‘the Other’ being denied self-representation.
• SEED: Foundation for the later Islamophobia readings: the same write-about-but-are-not-written-about asymmetry will recur when Muslims are constructed as objects of Western knowledge.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 779