Said’s double periodization of Orientalism undermines its causal link to colonialism

Evidence

Now, if there really is only this seamless and incremental history of ‘Orientalist Discourse’ from Aeschylus to Dante to Marx to Bernard Lewis, then in what sense could one rake the eighteenth century ‘as a roughly defined starting point’? In other words, one does not really know whether ‘Orientalist Discourse’ begins in the post-Enlightenment period or at the dawn of European civilization, whether in the period of the Battle of Plassey or in the days of the Battle of Troy. This, then, raises the question of the relationship between Orientalism and colonialism. In one sort of reading, where post-Enlightenment Europe is emphasized, Orientalism appears to be an ideological corollary of colonialism. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 740

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s Foucault-through-Spivak-through-Ahmad lineage: this is Ahmad exposing an internal contradiction in discourse-first theory. — connects to: Said holds incompatible Foucauldian and humanist periodizations of Orientalism at once. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 663
• QUESTION: The oscillation between Aeschylean and post-Enlightenment origins is a genuine instability in Said worth chasing against Foucault’s own two genealogies of race-struggle discourse.