The Orientalist’s voice displaces the entire Orient’s history

Evidence

In such a case, therefore, style is not only the power to symbolize such enormous generalities as Asia, the Orient, or the Arabs; it is also a form of displacement and incorporation by which one voice becomes a whole history, and—for the white Westerner, as reader or writer—the only kind of Orient it is possible to know. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 619

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: This is the displacement/incorporation mechanism that reappears in the Islamophobia literature on who gets to speak for Muslims.
• DEFINE: Defines ‘style’ as a political power — displacement and incorporation — rather than mere rhetorical flair.

Related

• Western expert style displaces the Orient’s own voice into one history (similarity 0.88)
• Orientalism is a discourse, not a mirror of imperial political power (similarity 0.86)
• The Orientalist’s constructed Orient displaced the actual Orient in European discourse (similarity 0.86)
• Orientalism is a political doctrine arising from Western dominance (similarity 0.86)
• Orientalism operates as a discourse with material institutional support (similarity 0.85)
• Orientalism reflects the producing culture rather than its putative object (similarity 0.85)
• The Orient’s effective absence from Western culture enables the Orientalist’s presence and authority. (similarity 0.85)
• Orientalization results from power and domination, not merely imaginative necessity (similarity 0.84)
• Written statements about the Orient are self-referential, not grounded in the Orient (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalist science and personal utterance alike erase the modern Orient’s human reality (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalism’s essentialism hides both historical change and the Orientalist’s interests (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalist discourse gives Western projects meaning and reality independent of the Orient (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalist texts were designed for Western readers, not Oriental ones. (similarity 0.84)
• Western cultural discourse about the Orient is a formidable structure of domination. (similarity 0.84)
• Orientalist scholarship is inseparable from imperial power and its orthodox attitudes (similarity 0.84)

Broader Connections

• The Orientalist’s constructed Orient displaced the actual Orient in European discourse #corroborates (0.95) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 342