Orientalist travel writing solidifies race prejudice rather than conveying knowledge

Evidence

His ostensible purpose in the book is to prove that travel in the Orient is important to “moulding of your character—that is, your very identity,” but in fact this turns out to be little more than solidifying “your” anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and general all-purpose race prejudice. We are told, for instance, that the Arabian Nights is too lively and inventive a work to have been created by a “mere Oriental, who, for creative purposes, is a thing dead and dry—a mental mummy.” Although Kinglake blithely confesses to no knowledge of any Oriental language, he is not constrained by ignorance from making sweeping generalizations about the Orient, its culture, mentality, and society. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 493

Categorization

• DEFINE: Illustrates how individual Orientalist self-formation operates through prejudice rather than encounter; a concrete mechanism for the theoretical claim that the Orient serves the Western ego.
• XREF: Connects to the scaffold goal of tracing how how the Western self is constructed in opposition to a degraded Orient; parallels later Islamophobia readings of ‘self-formation via the other’. — connects to: European women’s travel writing both echoed and contested myths about Muslim women’s oppression
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 493