Said’s Orientalism never portrays colonized people as real human beings

Evidence

Said’s “human”—especially in his Orientalism, and even as Apter wants to portray this category in Said’s thought—is a Western, textual human. In fact, Orientalism’s Orientals never emerge as real human beings, as mothers, friends, children, laborers, scholars, “organic” intellectuals, peasants, banished and dispossessed communities, or prisoners of various forms of colonial imprisonment. This humanization of the colonized was reserved by Said for his later writings, passingly in Culture and Imperialism (for example, page 59) and more robustly in his work on Palestine, a “question” that was for him, as it was for many others, a largely, if not entirely, political problem. Judging it from the stark reality of colonized space, Orientalism may easily come across as an elitist academic work whose concern for the oppressed is driven by the hem and haw of a bourgeois ethic. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 551

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader postcolonial theory canon and critiques of Said, e.g. Aijaz Ahmad’s ‘In Theory’ which leveled a related charge.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does Hallaq’s critique here parallel or diverge from Ahmad and other leftist critics of Orientalism’s textuality?