The nexus of knowledge and power creating "the Oriental" and in a sense obliterating him as a human being is therefore not for me an exclusively academic matter. Yet it is an intellectual matter of some very obvious importance. I have been able to put to use my humanistic and political concerns for the analysis and description of a very worldly matter, the rise, the development, and consolidation of Orientalism. Too often literature and culture are presumed to be politically, even historically innocent; it has regularly seemed otherwise to me, and certainly my study of Orientalism has convinced me (and I hope it will convince my literary colleagues) that society and literary culture can only be studied together. In addition, and by an almost inescapable logic, I have found myself writing the history of a strange, secret sharer of Western anti-Semitism.

XREF: Connects to Said's broader thesis in Orientalism and to postcolonial critique methods that insist on the political embeddedness of culture.

Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imag…, loc. 395