Orientalist stereotypes project producers’ fears rather than describing their targets

Evidence

Orientalism responded more to the culture that produced it than to its putative object, which was also produced by the West. Thus the history of Orientalism has both an internal consistency and a highly articulated set of relationships to the dominant culture surrounding it. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 91 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

One aspect of the electronic, postmodern world is that there has been a reinforcement of the stereotypes by which the Orient is viewed. Television, the films, and all the media’s resources have forced information into more and more standardized molds. So far as the Orient is concerned, standardization and cultural stereotyping have intensified the hold of the nineteenth-century academic and imaginative demonology of “the mysterious Orient.” — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 99 (#expands, via linked claim)

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 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: American Orientalism justifies therapeutic violence against Arabs as civilizing mission — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 235; Electronic mass media reinforce and standardize inherited Orientalist stereotypes — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 99; Orientalism reflects the producing culture rather than its putative object — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 91 (+4 more)

Related

• Electronic mass media reinforce and standardize inherited Orientalist stereotypes (similarity 0.87)
• Orientalism reflects the producing culture rather than its putative object (similarity 0.87)
• Orientalist discourse gives Western projects meaning and reality independent of the Orient (similarity 0.86)
• Europe’s doubt about Oriental novelty serves as its cultural weapon (similarity 0.86)
• The Orientalist’s constructed Orient displaced the actual Orient in European discourse (similarity 0.84)
• Academic Orientalist expertise legitimizes rather than corrects crude stereotypes (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalist scholarship presents constructed artifacts as natural accounts of dead cultures. (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalism generated a free-floating mythology detached from actual Orientals (similarity 0.83)
• Oriental representations become repetitive pseudoincarnations serving narcissistic Western needs. (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalist writings assumed the Orient was inferior and childlike (similarity 0.83)
• Orient studies served Europe’s needs, not Asia’s reality (similarity 0.83)
• The word ‘Oriental’ alone invoked a fixed, unchallengeable body of knowledge (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalism legitimizes Muslim monsters rather than creating them (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalist representations operate for purposes within specific historical and economic settings (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalization results from power and domination, not merely imaginative necessity (similarity 0.83)

Broader Connections

• Orientalism reflects the producing culture rather than its putative object #corroborates (0.95) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 91
• Electronic mass media reinforce and standardize inherited Orientalist stereotypes #expands (0.90) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 99
• Orientalist discourse gives Western projects meaning and reality independent of the Orient #expands (0.85) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 264
• Western audiences explain away Asian creators’ skills through exoticizing frames #exemplifies (0.80) — Crystal Abidin, Internet Celebrity, 127
• Cold War policy sciences retooled Orientalist stereotypes for national-security manipulation #exemplifies (0.80) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 301
• Orientalist monster fantasies transferred freely across religious and ethnic enemy groups #exemplifies (0.75) — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 418