Orientalist texts functioned as blueprints for material re-creation, not just misrepresentation

Evidence

What I have just outlined remains preparatory for my engagement with colonialism as a concrete manifestation of the knowledge that Europe produced, a knowledge of a distinctive category. In chapter 2, I attempt to show that this knowledge did not just reproduce the Orient in the Orientalist text, as Said supposed, nor was the text an aftereffect of political and economic power and colonialism. Rather, the text was embedded in a larger subtext that both prescribed and described engineering projects on the colonized ground. In other words, the Orientalist text was not really just about misrepresentation, though misrepresent it did. Nor was it really about scholarly biases, a sense of superiority, and such things as a discursive “style of domination,” to cite Said (3). The Orientalist text was the blueprint or a road map for an effective, and not just textual, re-creation of the Orient. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 37

Categorization

• XREF: Direct challenge to Said’s Orientalism as purely discursive misrepresentation; connects to the reader’s broader postcolonial theory reading.