The Orientalist’s internal East-West conflict erases Oriental agency

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 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The canal project imposed modern technopolitical will upon the fixity of East and West.; The Orientalist’s authority required disengagement from lived Oriental life; Orientalism fixes the Orient as passive reactor to the West’s self-assigned agency (+7 more)

Related

• Orientalism fixes the Orient as passive reactor to the West’s self-assigned agency (similarity 0.92)
• The imagined Orient’s internal ‘dislocation’ is the position from which Orientalists justify their authority (similarity 0.91)
• Orientalism presents Arabs as static types rather than historical agents (similarity 0.90)
• Orientalism defines the Orient as innately resistant to change and modernity (similarity 0.90)
• Orientalism’s essentialism hides both historical change and the Orientalist’s interests (similarity 0.90)
• Latent Orientalism denies the Orient any possibility of development or transformation (similarity 0.89)
• Essentialist Orientalist vision erases historical development in favor of unchanging geographic types. (similarity 0.89)
• Orientalist science and personal utterance alike erase the modern Orient’s human reality (similarity 0.88)
• Orientalism fixed the Orient as uniform, undeveloped, and incapable of self-definition (similarity 0.88)
• A shared East-West binary grounds vast and diverse bodies of thought (similarity 0.88)
• Area-studies Orientalism erases politics, economics, and history by collapsing all Orientals into one essence (similarity 0.87)
• Even sympathetic Orientalists denied the Orient modernity by casting it as ancient and Semitic. (similarity 0.87)
• Shared intellectual authority over the Orient unified otherwise divergent national Orientalisms (similarity 0.87)
• Orientalist scholarship edited the Orient by excising whatever offended European norms (similarity 0.86)
• Orientalist assumptions restrict non-Western history to relations with the West (similarity 0.86)

Broader Connections

• Orientalism fixes the Orient as passive reactor to the West’s self-assigned agency #corroborates (0.92)
• Orientalism presents Arabs as static types rather than historical agents #corroborates (0.90)
• Orientalism fixed the Orient as uniform, undeveloped, and incapable of self-definition #corroborates (0.88) — Chris Allen, Islamophobia, 188
• Orientalist assumptions restrict non-Western history to relations with the West #expands (0.80)
• Bernard Lewis reduced fourteen centuries of East-West to unchanging conflict. #exemplifies (0.80) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 27
• Orientalism is a political doctrine arising from Western dominance #expands (0.75)
• Western scholarship constructed the East as savage to justify imperial conquest. #expands (0.75)