Treating Aeschylus as an Orientalist reduces knowledge to mere geography

Evidence

Orientalists can be found everywhere and in every period, in the West. About how an Orientalist of the fifth century BC differs from a medieval or a nineteenth-century one we get not a single word from Said in the way of an explanation, except that they all spoke on behalf of, and thus misrepresented, the Orient. What the performative means and discursive technologies available to Aeschylus to “transform” the Orient (21) are we are not told. Nor are we privy to the qualitative differentials or cognates between an Aeschylus and a Dante, or a Dante and a Bernard Lewis. What is striking especially in the case of “classical Greece,” to which Said attributes a “schematization of Orientalism,” is that Said himself, in another writing in the context of the debate over Black Athena, made so much, and rightly so, of Europe’s relatively recent appropriation of Greece as “Western.” Said’s citation of Aeschylus (apart from its anachronistic nature) necessarily leads to the absurd conclusion that knowledge is determined by geographical location qua location, not by a specific culture, a specific ideology, or a specific structure of thought. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 55

Categorization

• XREF: The internal contradiction Hallaq flags — Said both insisting Greece is a recent ‘Western’ appropriation and citing Aeschylus as an Orientalist — echoes Bernal’s Black Athena debate that Hallaq references.
• DEEPTHINKING: Hallaq’s point that conflating all eras of ‘Orientalists’ collapses the specific ideological and institutional formations that distinguish a fifth-century Greek tragedian from a nineteenth-century colonial administrator is a genuinely dense, paradigm-level objection to Said’s vast periodization.