Said’s critique of Orientalism never explained how discourse connects to colonial power

Evidence

The method he employed to demonstrate the collusion of Orientalism with power amounted to a series of dissections of individual scholars’ writings. These individual dissections always stood in a dialectical relationship to an overarching discourse that gave them unity, but were then corralled back into the overarching discursive tradition. The dialectic, in other words, remained confined to the space between the individual text and the organizing suprastructure. How this suprastructure established well-defined and concrete relationships of power with colonialism and other manifestations of dominance was never made clear. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 24

Categorization

• QUESTION: This is a substantive methodological critique worth chasing: what exactly does Hallaq think Said omitted, and does the fuller account Hallaq offers fill that gap?
• XREF: connects to: Said’s Foucauldian ‘will to power’ discourse operates without imperialist agency or design. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 759