Rebutting Orientalism with reverse essentialism would reproduce the same intellectual failure.

Evidence

I consider Orientalism’s failure to have been a human as much as an intellectual one; for in having to take up a position of irreducible opposition to a region of the world it considered alien to its own, Orientalism failed to identify with human experience, failed also to see it as human experience. … Above all, I hope to have shown my reader that the answer to Orientalism is not Occidentalism. No former “Oriental” will be comforted by the thought that having been an Oriental himself he is likely—too likely—to study new “Orientals”—or “Occidentals”—of his own making. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 830

Categorization

• XREF: Directly scaffolds the Islamophobia readings ahead: criticism of the field must not simply invert the Othering gesture. Also resonates with Frantz Fanon on the risk of black self-objectification reversing colonial categories.
• DEEPTHINKING: The move from ‘Orientalism fails as human knowledge’ to ‘the cure is not Occidentalism but the refusal of the whole manacle-producing system’ is a dense, paradigm-shifting turn.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 830