The West and the Rest is constituted as a discourse, not a geography

Evidence

This essay explores the role which societies outside Europe played in the process of their becoming (or unevenly becoming) “modern.” It examines how an idea of “the West and the Rest” was constituted, how relations between Western and non-Western societies came to be represented. We refer to this as the formation of the “discourse” of “the West and the Rest.” — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 503

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the central term ‘discourse of the West and the Rest’ as the chapter’s object of analysis.
• XREF: Direct scaffold for Said’s Orientalism and the construction-of-the-Other literature that Islamophobia studies builds on. — connects to: Spatial categories like East and West are real yet historically constructed, not natural. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1590