The Westerner’s intimate estrangement from the Orient reinforces the Orientalist discourse built on it.

Evidence

Taking the late eighteenth century as a very roughly defined starting point Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 55 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Said’s Orientalism is not a book about the Orient per se. It is a book that analyzes Western discourse about the Orient, including Islam and Arab peoples, and how this discourse relates to Western domination over the Orient in light of the colonial projects of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. — Green, Todd H, The Fear of Islam_ An Introduction to…, 206 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Orientalist writing reduces the Orient to an occasion for Western male reverie.; The Orient served Western travelers as a stage for their own self-creation.; The Orientalist’s constructed Orient displaced the actual Orient in European discourse (+5 more)

Related

• Western scholars controlled the academic study of the Orient even as late as 1927. (similarity 0.91)
• Western scholarly discourse about the Orient was entangled with colonial domination (similarity 0.91)
• The Orientalist’s constructed Orient displaced the actual Orient in European discourse (similarity 0.90)
• Western cultural discourse about the Orient is a formidable structure of domination. (similarity 0.90)
• All Western writers treated the Orient as fixed, feminine, and needing redemption (similarity 0.90)
• Orient studies served Europe’s needs, not Asia’s reality (similarity 0.89)
• Orientalism is a corporate discourse that produces the Orient (similarity 0.89)
• For imperial discourse, knowledge of the Orient constitutes power over it (similarity 0.89)
• Europeans claimed to possess the Orient’s souls beyond territorial power (similarity 0.88)
• British control of the Orient depended on constantly refined knowledge of it (similarity 0.88)
• Orientalism fixes the Orient as passive reactor to the West’s self-assigned agency (similarity 0.87)
• Colonial administrator attitudes toward the Orient formed a shared consensus (similarity 0.87)
• Orientalist discourse was addressed exclusively to Western audiences, never to Orientals (similarity 0.87)
• Orient and West are unstable human constructs, not fixed realities (similarity 0.87)
• Culture, not merely power, dynamically created Western interest in the Orient (similarity 0.87)

Broader Connections

• Orientalism is a corporate discourse that produces the Orient #corroborates (0.85) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 55
• The Orientalist’s constructed Orient displaced the actual Orient in European discourse #corroborates (0.83)
• Western scholarly discourse about the Orient was entangled with colonial domination #corroborates (0.82) — Green, Todd H, The Fear of Islam_ An Introduction to…, 206
• Orientalist scholarship constructs narrative order over the Orient’s supposed nonhistory. #expands (0.75)
• The West and the Rest is a constructed, contingent discourse #expands (0.74)
• Culture, not merely power, dynamically created Western interest in the Orient #corroborates (0.72) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 71