The Orient is constituted as absence while the Orientalist constitutes himself as presence

Evidence

As Hussain states, this process established ‘an absolute and systematic difference between the West … and the Orient, which is aberrant, undeveloped and inferior’. More worrying for him though, and in offering some explanation of what was to follow, Hussain explains that what emerged was a notion and preconception of the Orient that was ‘uniform and incapable of defining itself … either to be feared … or to be controlled’. — Chris Allen, Islamophobia, 188 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Orientalist scholarship produced knowledge about the Orient that Orientals themselves did not possess — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 341; The Orientalist’s constructed Orient displaced the actual Orient in European discourse; Orientalist self-fashioning turns the traveler into a privileged interpreter of the Orient (+11 more)

Related

• European representation of the Orient outweighs actual Oriental lived experience (similarity 0.91)
• Orientalism defines the Orient as innately resistant to change and modernity (similarity 0.91)
• The imagined Orient’s internal ‘dislocation’ is the position from which Orientalists justify their authority (similarity 0.91)
• Orientalist science and personal utterance alike erase the modern Orient’s human reality (similarity 0.91)
• Orientalism’s essentialism hides both historical change and the Orientalist’s interests (similarity 0.90)
• Orientalism fixes the Orient as passive reactor to the West’s self-assigned agency (similarity 0.90)
• Orientalism fixed the Orient as uniform, undeveloped, and incapable of self-definition (similarity 0.90)
• Essentialist Orientalist vision erases historical development in favor of unchanging geographic types. (similarity 0.89)
• Latent Orientalism denies the Orient any possibility of development or transformation (similarity 0.89)
• Orientalist typing subordates individual Arab experience to a fixed collective essence (similarity 0.88)
• Orientalist scholarship edited the Orient by excising whatever offended European norms (similarity 0.88)
• Orientalism presents Arabs as static types rather than historical agents (similarity 0.88)
• Single discrete studies confirmed the Orient’s total essential character (similarity 0.88)
• The Orientalist’s constructed Orient displaced the actual Orient in European discourse (similarity 0.88)
• Even sympathetic Orientalists denied the Orient modernity by casting it as ancient and Semitic. (similarity 0.88)

Broader Connections

• Written statements about the Orient are self-referential, not grounded in the Orient #corroborates (0.85)
• Orientalism fixed the Orient as uniform, undeveloped, and incapable of self-definition #expands (0.82) — Chris Allen, Islamophobia, 188
• European representation of the Orient outweighs actual Oriental lived experience #expands (0.82)
• Orientalism is studied via its internal consistency, not its correspondence to a real Orient #corroborates (0.80)