Practice question · Multiple choice
Said held that Orientalist scholarship was superb AND that it served empire. Why are those two claims not in tension?
Hints
- The problem was not that the scholarship was sloppy.
- What did "static and despotic by nature" license?
Show the answer
D. European knowledge of the East produced its object and justified rule over it
Why
The scholarship was superb — meticulous, learned, philologically brilliant — and that is what made it useful. A people static and despotic by nature requires governing; knowledge and power were not neighbours but one operation.
Practise Postcolonialism and Subaltern Studies
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