The Orient in European writing was a chain of textual citations, not a place

Evidence

As a result the bulk of Voyage en Orient, like so much of the literature of Orientalism, turned out to be a reworking or direct repetition of earlier descriptions, in Nerval’s case mostly from Lane’s Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians. Such repetition and reworking is what Edward Said has referred to as the citationary nature of Orientalism, its writings added to one another ‘as a restorer of old sketches might put a series of them together for the cumulative picture they implicitly represent’. The Orient is put together as this ‘re-presentation’, and what is represented is not a real place but ‘a set of references, a congeries of characteristics, that seems to have its origin in a quotation, or a fragment of a text, or a citation from someone’s work on the Orient, or some bit of previous imagining, or an amalgam of all these’. The ‘East itself’ is not a place, despite the exhibition’s promise, but a further series of representations, each one reannouncing the reality of the Orient but doing no more than referring backwards and forwards to all the others. It is the chain of references that produces the effect of the place. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 123

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Said’s concept of the ‘citationary nature of Orientalism’ in a single compressed passage.
• DEEPTHINKING: The closing insight — ‘the chain of references produces the effect of the place’ — is a genuinely paradigm-shifting point about how representation fabricates reality, applicable far beyond Orientalism.