Orientalist scholarship constructs narrative order over the Orient’s supposed nonhistory.

Evidence

Even if the Orientalist does not explicitly judge his material as Dozy and Muir did, the principle of inequality exerts its influence nevertheless. It remains the professional Orientalist’s job to piece together a portrait, a restored picture as it were, of the Orient or the Oriental; fragments, such as those unearthed by Sacy, supply the material, but the narrative shape, continuity, and figures are constructed by the scholar, for whom scholarship consists of circumventing the unruly (un-Occidental) nonhistory of the Orient with orderly chronicle, portraits, and plots. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 387

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• XREF: The constructed-versus-found distinction in scholarship prefigures the representation/Other strand of the module.

Related

• Orientalist scholarship constructs narrative portraits from fragments, imposing order on a perceived nonhistory. (similarity 0.95)
• Orientalist scholarship presents constructed artifacts as natural accounts of dead cultures. (similarity 0.87)
• Orientalist scholarship confirms rather than unsettles existing ideas about the Orient. (similarity 0.86)
• Orientalism regularizes how the Orient is taught and administered (similarity 0.85)
• There has never been a pure or nonmaterial form of the Orient (similarity 0.85)
• Orientalism is only the visible tip of a larger modern structure. (similarity 0.85)
• The Orientalist’s constructed Orient displaced the Orient itself as the object of study (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalism operates as both an academic discipline and a repository of cultural images (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalism fixes the Oriental as passive object while the Orientalist holds interpretive power (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalism functions as a systemic structure embedded in the modern project (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalists recycled predecessors’ texts instead of observing the real Orient (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalism functions as a self-enclosed Western text rather than knowledge of an actual Orient. (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalism operates as a discourse with material institutional support (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalist scholarship widens rather than bridges the East-West divide (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalist writing reduces the Orient to an occasion for Western male reverie. (similarity 0.83)