Political imperialism governs entire fields of study, imagination, and scholarly institutions

Evidence

But there is no getting away from the fact that literary studies in general, and American Marxist theorists in particular, have avoided the effort of seriously bridging the gap between the superstructural and the base levels in textual, historical scholarship; on another occasion I have gone so far as to say that the literary-cultural establishment as a whole has declared the serious study of imperialism and culture off limits. For Orientalism brings one up directly against that question—that is, to realizing that political imperialism governs an entire field of study, imagination, and scholarly institutions—in such a way as to make its avoidance an intellectual and historical impossibility. Yet there will always remain the perennial escape mechanism of saying that a literary scholar and a philosopher, for example, are trained in literature and philosophy respectively, not in politics or ideological analysis. In other words, the specialist argument can work quite effectively to block the larger and, in my opinion, the more intellectually serious perspective. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 74

Categorization

• DEFINE: The core Orientalism claim in condensed form: imperialism is not merely a political economy but governs fields of knowledge production themselves.
• XREF: Builds the scaffold for how Islamophobia-as-field must treat its own disciplinary location — connects to Foucault’s power/knowledge and the biopolitics readings later in Module 2. — connects to: Empire generates the scholarly paradigms that then legitimize its interventions. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 263
• SEED: Angle: the ‘specialist argument’ as a recurring evasion in academic discourse — how appeals to disciplinary training block the study of how power shapes a field’s own assumptions.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 74