Orientalist works are best read as authorial detail within an imperial discursive space

Evidence

Therefore I study Orientalism as a dynamic exchange between individual authors and the large political concerns shaped by the three great empires—British, French, American—in whose intellectual and imaginative territory the writing was produced. What interests me most as a scholar is not the gross political verity but the detail, as indeed what interests us in someone like Lane or Flaubert or Renan is not the (to him) indisputable truth that Occidentals are superior to Orientals, but the profoundly worked over and modulated evidence of his detailed work within the very wide space opened up by that truth. One need only remember that Lane’s Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians is a classic of historical and anthropological observation because of its style, its enormously intelligent and brilliant details, not because of its simple reflection of racial superiority, to understand what I am saying here. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 76

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the method: read individual authors’ modulated detail within, not despite, the imperial framework that opened the space for that detail.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 76