Orientalist discourse gives Western projects meaning and reality independent of the Orient

Evidence

Such an Orient was silent, available to Europe for the realization of projects that involved but were never directly responsible to the native inhabitants, and unable to resist the projects, images, or mere descriptions devised for it. Earlier in this chapter I called such a relation between Western writing (and its consequences) and Oriental silence the result of and the sign of the West’s great cultural strength, its will to power over the Orient. But there is another side to the strength, a side whose existence depends on the pressures of the Orientalist tradition and its textual attitude to the Orient; this side lives its own life, as books about fierce lions will do until lions can talk back. The perspective rarely drawn on Napoleon and de Lesseps—to take two among the many projectors who hatched plans for the Orient—is the one that sees them carrying on in the dimensionless silence of the Orient mainly because the discourse of Orientalism, over and above the Orient’s powerlessness to do anything about them, suffused their activity with meaning, intelligibility, and reality. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 264

Categorization

• XREF: Core mechanism that will recur in Islamophobia readings: how a colonial discourse manufactures its own object of action and renders the native silent and passive — connects to the toolkit concept of the ‘Other’ as construction. — connects to: Orientalist stereotypes project producers’ fears rather than describing their targets
• DEFINE: Defines ‘Oriental silence’ and the textual attitude — the West acts on an Orient rendered silent and object-like by its own books.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 264