Orientalism operates as a discourse with material institutional support

Evidence

Yet none of this Orient is merely imaginative. The Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture. Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 52

Categorization

• DEFINE: Insists Orientalism is not mere stereotype or imagination but a discursive formation backed by institutions — the Foucaultian move.
• XREF: The ‘discourse with supporting institutions’ framework is the scaffolding link to hegemony/commonsense concepts the reader will need in Gramsci and later Islamophobia readings. — connects to: Intellectual orthodoxies require active institutional support to survive crises, not inertia — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 552; Institutional Orientalism rests on four interlocking civilizational assumptions about stagnant Eastern societies — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 180; Said’s Orientalism replaced Marxism with Foucauldian Discourse Theory — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 723
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 52