Orientalism functions as an archive producing regular knowledge of Orientals.

Evidence

Said argues that “in a sense Orientalism was a library or archive of information commonly … held. What bound the archive together was a family of ideas and a unifying set of values proven in various ways to be effective. These ideas explained the behaviour of Orientals; they supplied Orientals with a mentality, a genealogy, an atmosphere; most important, they allowed Europeans to deal with and even to see Orientals as a phenomenon possessing regular characteristics” (1985, 41–42). — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 596

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines how a representational archive converts a people into a phenomenon with ‘regular characteristics’ — the mechanism that turns colonized people into predictable objects of knowledge.
• XREF: This ‘archive’ concept parallels Foucauldian discourse and will recur in Islamophobia readings treating prejudice as a knowledge system, not mere ignorance.