The West’s self-image as civilized required the constructed Other to define against

Evidence

And yet, all this depended on the discursive figures of the “noble versus ignoble savage,” and of “rude and refined nations” which had been formulated in the discourse of “the West and the Rest.” So the Rest was critical for the formation of Western Enlightenment—and therefore for modern social science. Without the Rest (or its own internal “others”), the West would not have been able to recognize and represent itself as the summit of human history. The figure of “the Other,” banished to the edge of the conceptual world and constructed as the absolute opposite, the negation, of everything which the West stood for, reappeared at the very center of the discourse of civilization, refinement, modernity, and development in the West. “The Other” was the “dark” side—forgotten, repressed, and denied, and the reverse image of enlightenment and modernity. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 670

Categorization

• XREF: This is Hall’s statement of the very mechanism Orientalism describes — the West defines itself by negation against its constructed ‘Other’ — the central scaffolding concept for the Islamophobia field. — connects to: A fertile but unexamined opacity now blocks Western self-projection — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 574; Western pioneer men displayed crude domestic manners as a badge of identity — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 27
• DEEPTHINKING: The dialectical point — that the ‘Other’ banished to the conceptual periphery reappears at the center of the discourse of civilization — is a dense, paradigm-shifting inversion worth sitting with.
• ADDENDUM: The structure here — a dominant identity constituted by the constructed opposite against which it defines itself — parallels the mechanism already developed in the ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ piece, where dress norms position in-groups through contrast with stigmatized others.