Orientalists’ self-image as individual visionaries concealed their shared colonial project

Evidence

Out of such a coercive framework, by which a modern “colored” man is chained irrevocably to the general truths formulated about his prototypical linguistic, anthropological, and doctrinal forebears by a white European scholar, the work of the great twentieth-century Oriental experts in England and France derived. … Each—Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Doughty, Lawrence, Bell, Hogarth, Philby, Sykes, Storrs—believed his vision of things Oriental was individual, self-created out of some intensely personal encounter with the Orient, Islam, or the Arabs; each expressed general contempt for official knowledge held about the East. … Yet in the final analysis they all (except Blunt) expressed the traditional Western hostility to and fear of the Orient. … The main issue for them was preserving the Orient and Islam under the control of the White Man. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 598

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘personal mythology vs. shared framework’ tension feeds the later Islamophobia readings about expertise and authority. — connects to: Modernist exile is better explained by modernist self-image than by postcolonial conditions — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 523
• SEED: Angle: how self-styled ‘anti-establishment’ experts still reproduce the power structures they claim to reject.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 598