Orientalism stems from concrete national loss rather than abstract scholarship

Evidence

Musallam correctly notes that an Algerian would not have written the same kind of generally pessimistic book, especially one like mine that does very little with the history of French relations with North Africa, Algeria most particularly. So while I would accept the overall impression that Orientalism is written out of an extremely concrete history of personal loss and national disintegration—only a few years before I wrote Orientalism Golda Meir made her notorious and deeply Orientalist comment about there being no Palestinian people—I would also like to add that neither in this book, nor in the two that immediately followed it, The Question of Palestine (1980) and Covering Islam (1981), did I want only to suggest a political program of restored identity and resurgent nationalism. There was, of course, an attempt in both of the later books to supply what was missing in Orientalism, namely a sense of what an alternative picture of parts of the Orient—Palestine and Islam respectively—might be from a personal point of view. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 850

Categorization

• XREF: Golda Meir’s denial of a Palestinian people is a direct instance of Orientalist erasure — the denial of existence is itself a colonial act worth naming in the toolkit.
• DEFINE: Illustrates that Orientalism is not merely academic representation but a lived denial of a people’s existence.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 850