Said showed that representing colonized others is itself an act of power.

Evidence

In Orientalism, Edward Said (1978) applied Foucault’s method of discourse analysis to the texts produced by European orientalists about the “Orient,” the colonized world. In this view, the way others are represented in talk or discourse reflects prevailing regimes of knowledge and their truth claims, and in the process representation itself becomes a form of power. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 203

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Orientalism’s core claim and to general postcolonial theory; also echoes the reader’s interest in how knowledge regimes construct the people they describe.
• SEED: Angle: how ‘representation as power’ extends beyond colonial discourse to modern AI training data and algorithmic profiling of marginalized groups.