Status Updates From Orientalizm

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“Yet what gave the Oriental’s world its intelligibility and identity was not the result of his own efforts but rather the whole complex series of knowledgeable manipulations by which the Orient was identified by the West. … Knowledge of the Orient, because generated out of strength, in a sense creates the Orient, the Oriental, and his world.

The affinity between Renan and Gobineau, for example, was acknowledged by Renan to be a common philological and Orientalist perspective; in subsequent editions of the Histoire generale he incorporated some of Gobineau's work within his own. Thus did comparatism in the study of the Orient and Orientals come to be synonymous with the apparent ontological inequality of Occident and Orient.

There is nothing mysterious or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated, disseminated; it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status, it establishes canons of taste and value; it is virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true, and from traditions, perceptions, and judgements it forms, transmits, reproduces.”