Reading colonial-era scholarship as pure academia re-normalizes the colonialism it was built to serve

Evidence

It is instructive in this context to note how individual and group Orientalist discourses operated within Orientalism’s own discursive tradition. The French Orientalist production during this period was heavily geared toward France’s specific colonialist project in Algeria, essentially serving its interests. This production then had a certain specificity, not only because it was about Maliki jurisprudence but mainly because it constituted a part of a clearly political project. Yet, when these discourses (now seen as “books” and “scholarly articles”) were read in France and later in North America, the colonialist context was almost invariably subtracted from their constitution. They have now become just “scholarly contributions,” to be read like any other book or article on Algeria, Islam, the Orient, the world. If the colonialist context was so routinely subtracted, it is because colonialism itself was an essential component of the Orient itself, the latter inconceivable without the former. Which is to say that colonization is not only routinized but also normalized. It then becomes a scholarly discovery when an American Orientalist notices, a century after the event, that there is something disingenuous about that discourse, namely, that it is more colonialist and less “scholarly.” That this “bias” is brought to light a century after the event, when French settler colonialism and almost all such rudimentary forms of colonialism have lapsed, is remarkable in that in the very “critique” of such biased “scholarship” a new Orientalist scholarship sanctions the legitimacy of its own project, advancing its cause along the lines of a mutating discursive tradition of which this discourse is an essential part. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 775

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: This is a dense, multi-layered demonstration of how a discursive tradition mutates and self-legitimizes: the American Orientalist’s ‘critique’ of French colonial bias serves, not corrects, the ongoing tradition. The mechanism — subtraction of context producing normalization, then belated critique that re-licenses the critic’s own project — resists any one-sentence summary.
• XREF: Connects to the institutional-economics notion that discourse/tradition is self-reproducing (Milgrom on law merchant institutions) and to how social structures naturalize themselves — echoes Bourdieu’s doxa concept if added to reading list.