Orientalism functioned as a Western self-projection requiring an invented East as its antithesis

Evidence

Joseph Massad effectively sums up the Saidian project: When Orientalism came out, “few books unraveled the archaeology of Western identity the way Orientalism did. Said’s book ingeniously exposed the connections, relationships, modulations, and displacements in Orientalism’s production of an Orient that was a ruse for the production of the Occident. If Franz Fanon argued ‘Europe is literally the creation of the Third World,’ Said elaborated on that brilliant summation. Thus, for him, Orientalism was never about the Orient and its identity and culture but about the production of the West and its identity and culture—in short, a kind of Western projection; the West could not exist if the East were not invented as its antithesis, its opposite, its other.” — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 542

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘West needs an invented East to define itself’ thesis echoes the reader’s existing frameworks around identity construction through othering. — connects to: Said locates Orientalism’s founding structure in Aeschylean tragedy — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 737