Text-centric Orientalism could not abstract from words to a general Oriental mentality

Evidence

Orientalism, however, like all nineteenth-century science of man, had its limitations. It enabled colonial administrators to talk of the ‘Oriental mind’ and to conceive of its ‘backwardness’. But because its theory of language considered individual words to be plenitudes of meaning in themselves, Oriental Studies tended to remain caught up in the detailed analysis of texts. What was needed was a way of moving quickly from these empirical particulars to the abstraction of an Oriental mentality. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 441

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader argument about colonial knowledge production and how the ‘abstraction’ replaces direct engagement — parallels Said’s Orientalism. — connects to: Aggregating language literatures into an ‘Indian’ object requires new non-comparatist theoretical principles — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1150; the MOC “The Tongue of Power: When Language Becomes the Battlefield of Empire”