Western expert style displaces the Orient’s own voice into one history

Evidence

In such a case, therefore, style is not only the power to symbolize such enormous generalities as Asia, the Orient, or the Arabs; it is also a form of displacement and incorporation by which one voice becomes a whole history, and—for the white Westerner, as reader or writer—the only kind of Orient it is possible to know. Just as Renan had mapped the field of possibility open to the Semites in culture, thought, and language, so too Lawrence charts the space (and indeed, appropriates that space) and time of modern Asia. The effect of this style is that it brings Asia tantalizingly close to the West, but only for a brief moment. We are left at the end with a sense of the pathetic distance still separating “us” from an Orient destined to bear its foreignness as a mark of its permanent estrangement from the West. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 619

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines style as a mechanism of incorporation and displacement whereby one Western voice becomes the whole Orient, and the only knowable one.
• XREF: This is the core ‘representation makes the other speakable’ move that later Islamophobia readings will invoke — connects to Said’s overarching thesis of representation as construction.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 619