Summary
Said’s two methodological devices for studying Orientalist authority: strategic location, a way of describing the author’s position in a text with regard to the Oriental material he writes about, and strategic formation, a way of analyzing how groups, types and genres of texts acquire mass, density and referential power among themselves and in the culture at large (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.29 / printed p.20).
Details
- Strategy identifies the problem every writer on the Orient has faced: how to get hold of it, how to approach it, how not to be defeated or overwhelmed by its sublimity, its scope, its awful dimensions; the location includes the narrative voice adopted, the structure built, and the images, themes and motifs circulating in the text (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.29 / printed p.20).
- No location is abstract: every writer on the Orient, even Homer, assumes some Oriental precedent and previous knowledge of the Orient, and each work affiliates itself with other works, with audiences, with institutions, and with the Orient itself (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.29 / printed p.20).
- A formation — for example philological studies, anthologies of extracts from Oriental literature, travel books, Oriental fantasies — gains strength and authority from its presence in time, in discourse and in institutions such as schools, libraries and foreign services (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.29 / printed p.20).