Summary
Said’s distinction in Chapter Three, I of Orientalism between latent Orientalism — an almost unconscious and certainly untouchable positivity, the underlying doctrine of the Orient’s separateness, backwardness and need of Western redemption — and manifest Orientalism, the various stated views about Oriental society, languages, literatures, history and sociology, in which alone change in knowledge of the Orient occurs (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.215 / printed p.206).
Details
- Whatever change occurs in knowledge of the Orient is found almost exclusively in manifest Orientalism; the unanimity, stability and durability of latent Orientalism are more or less constant, and the differences among the nineteenth-century writers of Chapter Two can be characterized as exclusively manifest differences, in form and personal style, rarely in basic content: every one kept intact the separateness of the Orient, its eccentricity, its backwardness, its silent indifference, its feminine penetrability, its supine malleability (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.215 / printed p.206).
- Latent Orientalism found a willing partner in the racial classifications of Cuvier, Gobineau and Knox and in second-order Darwinism’s division of races into advanced and backward, and it encouraged a peculiarly male conception of the world, static, frozen and fixed eternally, which denied the Orient the very possibility of development or transformation (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.215-217 / printed p.206-208).
- The doxological manifestation of the quintessential Orient shaped by the pioneering scholars, travelers and poets is latent Orientalism, which supplied anyone wishing to make a statement of consequence about the Orient with an enunciative capacity; latent Orientalism was profoundly conservative, dedicated to its self-preservation, and staked its existence on its internal, repetitious consistency about its constitutive will-to-power over the Orient, surviving revolutions, world wars and the literal dismemberment of empires (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.230-231 / printed p.221-222).
- The convergence of latent doctrine and manifest experience, probably beginning when Orientalists from Sacy on undertook to advise governments, made the Orientalist the special agent of Western power; it occurred most dramatically when Asiatic Turkey was surveyed by Britain and France for its dismemberment after World War I (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.231-233 / printed p.222-224).