Said’s totalizing critique inadvertently immunized Orientalism against reform

Evidence

As if the reversal of analytic priorities were not enough of a problem, Said went on to condemn Orientalism in toto. A charitable reader might indulge the attack as a rhetorical strategy or as hyperbole, but the price of this charitable act would be too high to pay, for nothing short of theoretical coherence and a clear analytical vision are at stake. The totalization also blurs vision as to how power works, and contradicts the very Foucauldian theory that Said claimed to have influenced him. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 271 (#complicates, via linked claim)

The unidirectionality from Orient to Occident, or at best a dialectic that ends, in term of effect and manifestation, in Europe, more than finds adequate attention in Said’s Culture and Imperialism, a work that the author deemed to continue the investigations he started in Orientalism. In other words, Said’s concerns begin and end in the metropolitan centers of Western Empire, in their cultural and political constitutions and manifestations, centers that produced “estimable and admirable works of art and learning,” from which he derived aesthetic “pleasure” and “profit.” And so like Orientalist works, which he on the whole appears to find less aesthetically appealing, if not downright objectionable, his preoccupation is, at the end of the day, the West’s metropolitan cultural and scholarly production, the world that Said in reality knew and the world that in effect formed him in almost every important way, despite any articulation of his identity as a Palestinian. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 104 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Said’s own critique reproduces the fixed Occident-Orient essentialism it attacks — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 747; Said’s critique unwittingly reinforced the very formation it attacked; Said’s critique reified Orientalism as a category masking deeper structures — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 523 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Totalizing condemnation of Orientalism contradicts Said’s own Foucauldian framework #complicates (0.74) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 271
• Said’s critique of Orientalism implicitly reinforced the very modernism it attacked #complicates (0.72)
• Said’s critique of Orientalism relies on the same modernist assumptions that produced it #complicates (0.71) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 476
• Said’s critique mirrored Orientalism by fixating on Western metropolitan culture #complicates (0.71) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 104