Practice question · True or false
Said held that Orientalist scholarship could be both technically excellent and an instrument of empire.
Hints
- Was his charge incompetence?
- Rigour and complicity are compatible.
Show the answer
True
Why
True. That is what makes the argument uncomfortable: he did not claim the philology was sloppy, much of it was superb, but that producing the Orient as a knowable, essentially different object served the administration of it. A charge of mere error would have been far easier to answer.
Practise Postcolonialism and Subaltern Studies
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