Said’s Orientalism concerned representation, not colonial discourse reception

Evidence

I think Sudipta Kaviraj puts the matter well when he says that “what Said described and analysed was not what is called colonial discourse in the narrow sense. His work was concerned primarily with European, and subsequently, Western representations of the Orient. He rarely concerns himself with the question of what happened in the reception of these ideas in the very different context of colonial societies.… But there is no doubt that his side of the picture exerted great influence on the debates about colonial discourse and knowledge. Strictly, these two things are different.” — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 531

Categorization

• DEFINE: Kaviraj draws a clean distinction between ‘Western representation of the Orient’ (what Said studied) and ‘colonial discourse’ as actually received and used in colonial societies — two things often conflated.
• DEEPTHINKING: This distinction — between the production of a representational discourse and its consumption/reception in colonial contexts — is a genuinely subtle and paradigm-shifting separation that underlies much misuse of Said.