The Occident-Orient binary describes contested interpretations, not real monolithic blocks

Evidence

For indeed, the subaltern can speak, as the history of liberation movements in the twentieth century eloquently attests. But I never felt that I was perpetuating the hostility between two rival political and cultural monolithic blocks, whose construction I was describing and whose terrible effects I was trying to reduce. On the contrary, as I said earlier, the Orient versus Occident opposition was both misleading and highly undesirable; the less it was given credit for actually describing anything more than a fascinating history of interpretations and of contesting interests, the better. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 845

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ which this passage explicitly invokes — a natural scaffold for the Islamophobia toolkit on who gets to represent whom. — connects to: Structural interpretation reads the gaps rather than the unified whole — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 1394
• DEFINE: Defines the core Orientalism claim: the East-West opposition is a constructed history of interpretations, not a real description of two blocks.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 845