Orientalism is a discourse, not a mirror of imperial political power

Evidence

Therefore, Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field that is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions; nor is it a large and diffuse collection of texts about the Orient; nor is it representative and expressive of some nefarious “Western” imperialist plot to hold down the “Oriental” world. It is rather a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but also of a whole series of “interests” which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political (as with a colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning sciences like comparative linguistics or anatomy, or any of the modern policy sciences), power cultural (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values), power moral (as with ideas about what “we” do and what “they” cannot do or understand as “we” do). Indeed, my real argument is that Orientalism is—and does not simply represent—a considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, and as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with “our” world. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 72

Categorization

• XREF: Defines ‘discourse’ as produced in uneven exchange with multiple forms of power — the key concept the Islamophobia field will build on; connects to Foucauldian discourse and to the reader’s scaffolding purpose of extracting how representation constructs the Other. — connects to: Orientalist ideas can circulate without imperial power structures; Institutional Orientalism, not all Orientalist scholarship, served colonial power
• DEFINE: Cast in negative terms (not a plot, not passive reflection) then positively: Orientalism is a discourse constituted by an uneven exchange with political, intellectual, cultural, and moral power.
• DEEPTHINKING: The distinction between Orientalism ‘being’ versus ‘representing’ power, and the claim that it concerns ‘our’ world more than the Orient, is the paradigm-shifting core of the whole theory.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 72