The Orientalist cast himself as a heroic rescuer of a lost Orient

Evidence

The modern Orientalist was, in his view, a hero rescuing the Orient from the obscurity, alienation, and strangeness which he himself had properly distinguished. His research reconstructed the Orient’s lost languages, mores, even mentalities, as Champollion reconstructed Egyptian hieroglyphics out of the Rosetta Stone. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 332

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Defines the rescuer-hero subject position that underwrites Orientalist authority.

Related

• Orientalist scholarship resurrects and creates its object through philological techniques (similarity 0.86)
• The Orientalist expert becomes the representative Oriental himself (similarity 0.84)
• The Orientalist’s claim to expertise depends on the Orient’s presumed incapacity for self-interpretation (similarity 0.84)
• The Orient was framed as a degraded object awaiting European restoration (similarity 0.83)
• The Orientalist’s scholarly work is essentially an act of interpretation from outside, not participation (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalist scholarship constructs narrative order over the Orient’s supposed nonhistory. (similarity 0.83)
• Early Orientalists codified and domesticated the Orient into a European province of learning. (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalism operates as both an academic discipline and a repository of cultural images (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalism is only the visible tip of a larger modern structure. (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalism operates as a discourse with material institutional support (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalist scholarship confirms rather than unsettles existing ideas about the Orient. (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalism’s error is essentializing both Orient and West from above (similarity 0.82)
• The Orientalist’s role shifted from guild scholar to representative of Western supremacy. (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalist scholarship is inseparable from imperial power and its orthodox attitudes (similarity 0.82)
• The Orient as a topos derives from text and citation, not direct observation. (similarity 0.82)