The Orient is granted the fiction of self-representation while being represented for Western audiences

Evidence

The idea encouraged is that in studying Orientals, Muslims, or Arabs “we” can get to know another people, their way of life and thought, and so on. To this end it is always better to let them speak for themselves, to represent themselves (even though underlying this fiction stands Marx’s phrase—with which Lasswell is in agreement—for Louis Napoleon: “They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented”). But only up to a point, and in a special way. In 1973, during the anxious days of the October Arab-Israeli War, the New York Times Magazine commissioned two articles, one representing the Israeli and one the Arab side of the conflict. The Israeli side was presented by an Israeli lawyer; the Arab side, by an American former ambassador to an Arab country who had no formal training in Oriental studies. Lest we jump immediately to the simple conclusion that the Arabs were believed incapable of representing themselves, we would do well to remember that both Arabs and Jews in this instance were Semites (in the broad cultural designation I have been discussing) and that both were being made to be represented for a Western audience. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 743

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• XREF: Core scaffolding for the module: the ‘self-representation’ fiction and Marx’s ‘cannot represent themselves’ directly grounds how Islamophobia readings treat who is allowed to speak for Muslims.
• DEEPTHINKING: The doubled move — ‘let them speak for themselves’ as veneer, but representation always conducted by Western surrogates — is a dense, reusable mechanism for analyzing representation politics in later texts.

Related

• Media representation of the Arab-Israeli war sidelined Arab self-representation (similarity 0.84)
• Both Arabs and Jews were recast as Semites for Western-mediated representation (similarity 0.83)
• The Orient cannot represent itself and needs the Western expert to testify. (similarity 0.83)
• All representations are embedded in their representer’s language, culture, and institutions. (similarity 0.81)
• Representation confines the Orient to a closed theatrical stage affixed to Europe (similarity 0.81)
• The Orient studied by scholars is a political system of representations, not raw reality (similarity 0.81)
• Representation constructs the Orient as a closed theatrical stage, not an open reality. (similarity 0.80)
• Orientalism fixes the Oriental as passive object while the Orientalist holds interpretive power (similarity 0.80)
• Representations are necessarily embedded in culture, language, and politics, never pure truth. (similarity 0.79)
• The Orientalist’s claim to expertise depends on the Orient’s presumed incapacity for self-interpretation (similarity 0.79)
• Modern Orientalism is defined by expanded representational range, not greater accuracy (similarity 0.79)
• Orientalism is a discourse, not a mirror of imperial political power (similarity 0.79)
• Western expert style displaces the Orient’s own voice into one history (similarity 0.79)