His
Orientalism offers trenchant criticism of "Orientalist" scholarship and calls for a theoretical and interdisciplinary rearrangement of knowledge in relation to questions of power and empire that would seek not a new field of research but more integrated and self-reflective approaches in the scholarly study of the global South and East. Subsequent postcolonial, subaltern, and, more broadly, cultural studies, all of which attempt to shed light on increasingly manifold forms of multicultural identities, have greatly benefited from his work. Said himself, however, retained an allegiance to his early literary training in close reading and philology (a training evident in his scrupulous and detailed analyses), and he was at times, as in
Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004), somewhat dismissive of "contemporary critics who prefer what is implicit to what the text actually says" (p. 88).
Said's definition of the term Orientalism has multiple facets. In his book Orientalism he seeks to present and interpret it "as a historical phenomenon, a way of thought, a contemporary problem, and a material reality" (p. 44). In part, this complexity results from his historical insight into the "Orient" as "that semi-mythical construct which since Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in the late eighteenth century has been made and re-made countless times by power acting through an expedient form of knowledge" (p.
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