Reducing orientalism to mere imperial domination makes the research category superfluous

Evidence

The project of subsuming orientalism under the rubric of imperialism, however, has important limitations. Orientalism has certainly played a large role in the building of Western empires. But if there is nothing other to orientalism than that, if orientalism is seen merely as a special case of imperial domination, then why maintain a separate topic of research labeled “orientalism” at all? (Indeed, in the last decades of his life, Said himself preferred to focus on imperialism and colonialism rather than orientalism per se.) Orientalism is an instance of colonial discourse, but it is also more than that. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 83

Categorization

• XREF: Resonates with the reader’s work on how conceptual frameworks either survive or collapse when subsumed under a broader rubric.