Orientalism was a project of power and culture, not merely an academic enterprise

Evidence

When Europe developed Orientalism, it was a project integral to the rise of new modes of thought, economics, and forms of politics directed and commanded by the nation-state. But the project, as a subset of the larger European experiment that created modernity through subjugation of the Other, was profoundly anchored in the paradigmatic concepts of the Enlightenment. It is in this sense that Orientalism was a project of power and culture, anchored deep in the sovereign thought structure I have been outlining, and not merely an academic enterprise. As such, it was most natural for the agents of this enterprise to operate, like all others, within the cultural boundaries that modernity had come to require or, more precisely, determine and impose. Orientalism, like any other field of modern knowledge, contributed to the formation of that culture, which we have seen to be deeply rooted in a massive colonialist project that involved a structured and pervasive market of slavery, economic exploitation, structural genocides, and the control and subjection of the lives of countless tens of millions of non-Europeans (and disenfranchised Europeans as well). This is the world that made Orientalism possible, and it was in this world that it lived and served. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 466

Categorization

• XREF: Builds directly on the central thesis of Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism’, which this book is restating; also echoes the Foucaultian power-knowledge linkage that Said himself drew on. — connects to: Institutional Orientalism, not all Orientalist scholarship, served colonial power; Cultural Orientalism was admiring and varied, unlike institutional Orientalism that served colonialism.