The Orient served Western travelers as a stage for their own self-creation.

Evidence

Like many other travelers he is more interested in remaking himself and the Orient (dead and dry—a mental mummy) than he is in seeing what there is to be seen. Every being he encounters merely corroborates his belief that Easterners are best dealt with when intimidated, and what better instrument of intimidation than a sovereign Western ego? En route to Suez across the desert, alone, he glories in his self-sufficiency and power: “I was here in this African desert, and I myself, and no other, had charge of my life.” It is for the comparatively useless purpose of letting Kinglake take hold of himself that the Orient serves him. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 493

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Connects to the ‘self makes its own history’ theme in colonial psychology and to the Fanon reading on the colonized subject being made an object.

Related

• Actual travel experience leaves Orientalist preconceptions entirely undisturbed (similarity 0.89)
• By 1850 the Orient had become a self-fashioning career (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalist travel writing solidifies race prejudice rather than conveying knowledge (similarity 0.84)
• Western cultural discourse about the Orient is a formidable structure of domination. (similarity 0.84)
• Actual travel to the Orient did not alter pre-formed Western prejudices. (similarity 0.83)
• The Orient was made Oriental through power and domination, not imagination alone (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalism functions as a self-enclosed Western text rather than knowledge of an actual Orient. (similarity 0.83)
• Chateaubriand made the Orient a projection of his own selfhood (similarity 0.82)
• Knowledge of the Orient requires conceiving it as ruled by Europe (similarity 0.82)
• Even putatively impartial scientific Orientalism remains an egoistic interpretive act that rebuilds its object. (similarity 0.81)
• The image of the Orient as empty desert justified imperial conquest. (similarity 0.81)
• Western scholarly handling turned the Orient from alien into colonial space (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalist self-fashioning turns the traveler into a privileged interpreter of the Orient (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalism functioned as a Western self-projection requiring an invented East as its antithesis (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalization results from power and domination, not merely imaginative necessity (similarity 0.81)