Said’s account makes colonialism an effect of discourse, not material power.

Evidence

In a revealing use of the word ‘delivered’, Said remarks at one point that Orientalism delivered the Orient to colonialism, so that colonialism begins to appear as a product of Orientalism itself – indeed, as the realization of the project already inherent in Europe’s perennial project of inferiorizing the Orient first in discourse and then in colonization. This is, of course, doubly paradoxical, since Said is vehement in his criticism of ‘Orientalism’ for its highly ‘textual’ attitude, yet in his own account imperialist ideology itself appears to be an effect mainly of cetain kinds of writing. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 332

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Ahmad exposes the self-undermining logic: a critic who attacks textuality builds a theory that makes textual discourse the engine of imperialism — a genuinely dense reversal worth sitting with.
• XREF: connects to: Said’s Foucauldian ‘will to power’ discourse operates without imperialist agency or design. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 759

Related

• Said’s Foucauldian ‘will to power’ discourse operates without imperialist agency or design. (similarity 0.89)
• Said’s Orientalism deploys incompatible Foucauldian and humanist origin-stories simultaneously. (similarity 0.88)
• Said centrally shaped literary theory on colonialism after Orientalism (similarity 0.87)
• Said’s critique of Orientalism never explained how discourse connects to colonial power (similarity 0.87)
• Said presents colonial figures as products of Orientalist discourse rather than material interests (similarity 0.87)
• Said’s Orientalism shaped a field mainly through emotive impact (similarity 0.87)
• Said’s Orientalism concerned representation, not colonial discourse reception (similarity 0.85)
• Said showed that representing colonized others is itself an act of power. (similarity 0.85)
• Said’s critique of Orientalism mirrors the procedures of his adversaries. (similarity 0.85)
• Orientalism argued Western literatures were complicit in colonialism (similarity 0.84)
• Said’s later essays reversed his Orientalism critique into a desire for Western location (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalism operates as a discourse with material institutional support (similarity 0.83)
• Said’s method cannot simultaneously hold realist historical grounding and non-mimetic discourse theory (similarity 0.83)
• Said’s self-divided method generates confusions reproduced in Colonial Discourse Analysis (similarity 0.83)
• Text-centric Orientalism could not abstract from words to a general Oriental mentality (similarity 0.83)