Thoughts about this?

Muh empathy is a shitlib code word for ideological conformity. These people are totally westernized they don't know anything about classical Islamic philosophy for example, it's all about generic 21st century tumblr whining

It was basically a hatchet job intended to destroy the foreign studies disciplines that (among other tools) allowed European nations to so successfully control foreign colonies. It worked, so mad respect, I guess, although it would have been better/more interesting if other cultures had developed "occidentalism" disciplines.

That's the thing though. The idea that a 19th century orientalist like George Staunton or Edward Lane has less "empathy" for the cultures they study than a modern "Asian Studies" or "Middle Eastern Studies" student who can't even form a complete sentence in a foreign language is absurd. The modern student's cluelessness is the exact point; it's not important that he has any idea about his alleged area of expertise so much as that he's able to pose as an expert and regurgitate the correct lines.

That's just globalised (((pop culture))), it's no more western then Hollywood is.

Nowadays, even natsec shills have learned to name drop Edward Said whenever they want to shutdown criticism of the latest genocidal band of 'moderate rebels' to gain the empire's favor. Western academia tends to overestimate its own influence, muh texts count little next to petrodollars and targeted bombs.

> even natsec shills have learned to name drop Edward Said whenever they want to shutdown criticism

Yeah not like this thread is about Edward Said's most famous work or anything.

Also you need to work on your reading comprehension/executive function if you think that my saying postcolonial area studies are less rigorous than their paleo versions constitutes "natsoc shilling" for anything.

>western academia tends to overestimate its own influene
Where do you think identity politics, feminism and BLM came from?

He made some interesting comments about the nature of western scholarship of eastern civilisations, but his complaints were pretty stupid. How else does a person try to understand a foreign civilisation except in the context of his own? And why does everyone trying to study another civilisation have to wish to dominate it? In the end, does this mean that people are only allowed to study their own cultures, and no one else's?

The whole thing seemed petulant and whiny, although the specific cases he talked about were interesting.

I'm not defending the current state of Western academia. I'm just saying the superficially 'radical' posturing is hollow and serves the same imperial ends while Providing less actual insight. It's all about the 21st century narcissistic self and it's desire for moral posturing. Bat sec means national security, the same neocons who shilled for Iraq in the language of western universalism, suddenly become die hard relativists when its convenient

Bernard Lewis and Kedourie. Who else though?

bump

I completely agree with this statement:

>the superficially 'radical' posturing is hollow and serves the same imperial ends while providing less actual insight

Where we might disagree is that I think the new postcolonial "orientalists" are markedly worse than their predecessors. Even the quality of "imperial" governance it produces is terrible. Would a Victorian ever have been convinced it was a good idea to occupy Iraq for democracy? Bitch please.

A friend of mine who worked for the State Department and was stationed in the ME during the 70s and 80s was appalled when he saw some "Middle East" expert on television during the Iraq War fail to understand the significance of Tikrit and Saladin relative to Saddam Hussein. He also told me that the first thing the State Department guy whose job was to run Baghdad immediately after the invasion did was to attempt to ban smoking. Apparently that took priority over Sunni and Shia death squads.

You're quite right that the Victorians were much better at this sort of thing.

It's extremely important to realize that Said didn't actually care about whether the people he were criticizing were correct either individually or as members of a school of thought, or that his own arguments had any basis in reality. He's arguing that orientalism was immoral, not that it was incorrect. And while superficially he claims that it was immoral because it's racist, his real concern was that it was immoral because it was correct, or at least insightful, and that that knowledge provided power to the orientalists and their societies over the cultures they studied.

A better solution would have been for the Arabs (or whoever) to pull their heads out of their asses, but that wasn't happening so the next best thing was to make Western study of foreign cultures as useless as those cultures' examinations of themselves.

>the specific cases he talked about were interesting.

We call this cherrypicking user. Even when he wasn't just misrepresenting.

>although it would have been better/more interesting if other cultures had developed "occidentalism" disciplines.
i'd be interested in reading something like this. are there any prominent voices from the orient who have commented on the occident? other than memri tv, of course.

see a doctor u might have paranoid schizophrenia or something, i dunno

I think the ultimate irony is that if pre-postcolonial orientalism (is there a better word for what I'm describing?) had been allowed to develop naturally it would have been acted as an anti-neo-colonial force. Most of them had a serious attachment, if not affection, for their "target" cultures and societies. EVEN IF they remained out-and-out white supremacists to a man, it wouldn't be hard to sell them on self-determination, and even if it wasn't they probably wouldn't be in favor of gratuitous/cynical destabilization. Hell, plenty of 20th-century Arabists pretty much fit that description.

Ultimately post-colonial foreign studies turn out ignorant charlatans whose main academic tools are plausible-sounding defenses for not having a clue. Little surprise some of them end up as puppets for other interests.

I would categorise orientalists into three categories:

The first would be straightforward orientalists, which is anyone studying the orient up until, say, 1945. A lot of them were adventurers (Richard Burton being an example), some of them eccentrics (like C M Doughty), but in general they loved what they were studying and immersed themselves in it.

The second wave emerged during the Cold War, and I suspect were very much corrupted by the struggle between Capitalism and Communism. These are the people Said (often rightfully) criticises, as the work they produce is heavily biased to serve their ideological objectives.

The third wave of postcolonial orientalism would be the post-Said type, who are just as bad as the second wave except instead of being capitalists or communists they're all postcolonialists, and we all know what that means. They tend to morally idealise the objects of their study, and have an unhealthy obsession with the negative effects of western contact.

Agreed on the second category, but I think Said conflates them with the first group in bad faith.

what would you recommend specifically for boipucci?

absolute trash.
>hurrrrr white people think all asians are the same!!!
>hurrr THEY FORCE THEIR CULTURE ONTO EASTERN PEOPLE! LET THE EASTERN SAVAGES EAT DIRT!