Orientalism is a differentiated analysis, not a blanket attack on the West

Evidence

These considerations did in fact add to the pressures on my book to represent a sort of testament of wounds and a record of sufferings, the recital of which was felt as a long overdue striking back at the West. I deplore so simple a characterization of a work that is—here I am not going to be falsely modest—quite nuanced and discriminating in what it says about different people, different periods, and different styles of Orientalism. Each of my analyses varies the picture, increases the difference and discriminations, separates authors and periods from each other, even though all pertain to Orientalism. To read my analyses of Chateaubriand and Flaubert, or of Burton and Lane, with exactly the same emphasis, deriving the same reductive message from the banal formula “an attack on Western civilization” is, I believe, to be both simplistic and wrong. But I also believe that it is entirely correct to read recent Orientalist authorities, such as the almost comically persistent Bernard Lewis, as the politically motivated and hostile witnesses that their suave accents and unconvincing displays of learning attempt to hide. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 847

Categorization

• XREF: Guards against the strawman reading of the critical-theory toolkit the reader is building — the distinction between internal differentiation and reductive rejection matters for how these concepts get carried into Islamophobia readings.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 847