>The book The Arab Mind is one of the examples that Edward Said used to
>critique "Orientalism Now." See Said's Orientalism (NY: Vintage, 1978):
>pp. 308-9, 311, 312, 349. If the photographs of sexual torture at Abu
>Ghraib had been indeed used as a tool of blackmail, based on the
>orientalist conception of "the Arab Mind" that authors such as Patai
>expounded, the blackmail evidently failed to work, as Hersh notes. The
>failure, I submit, is not only evidence of torture's uselessness as an
>instrument of gathering information from the tortured that Darius Rejali
>documents but also proof that orientalism says more about phantasmagoric
>images of the "Western Self" and the "Oriental Other" that orientalists
>create as statically diametrical opposites than about objective and
>subjective lives of the Arabs and other so-called orientals which are as
>variegated as objective and subjective lives of any people anywhere else
>-- a confirmation of Edward Said's thesis.
>
><http://montages.blogspot.com/2004/05/orientalist-torture.html>
Not too long ago I thought it odd that you complained that the u.s. gubmint wasn't using orientalists:
Today's very American occupation relies on pollsters instead on eminent orientalists to whom the British empire looked. I jotted down some thoughts on pollsters and orientalists, including excerpts from Gertrude Bell's letters to her father, with a nod to Edward Said and Jacques Lacan: "The East Is a Career," <http://montages.blogspot.com/2004_04_01_montages_archive.html#108332184828668294>.
Kelley