Orientalism is a microcosm of a modernity that structurally requires colonialism and genocide.

Evidence

“Putting Orientalism in its Place” is a deliberately transgressive title that attempts to position this discipline and its discourse in nothing less than the deep structures of the modern project, thereby according the verticality otherwise missing from Said’s narrative a structure of its own. If, as I will argue, Orientalism is a microcosm of the macrocosmic modern structure, and if modernity and its human subject demand—and could not be sustained without—colonialism and genocide in all its forms, then Orientalism and many more forms of knowledge are embedded in terrains that Said and other commentators on Orientalism never cared to plough. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 32

Categorization

• SEED: An essay contrasting Said’s horizontal ‘scope’ with a vertical ‘structure’ reading could frame how disciplines like economics and journalism are equally embedded in modernity’s colonial-genocidal substrate.
• XREF: Connects to the ‘contrapuntal reading’ tradition and critiques of modernity’s dark side, e.g. Adorno/Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment on instrumental reason.