ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to move the concept of Orientalism beyond its familiar moorings in binary difference and argues further that Orientalism is neither simply an apparatus of power for managing the Orient,2 nor merely dispersable through its descriptive manifestations into its component parts, be they cultural-academic Orientalism or political-administrative Orientalism.3
At its zenith Orientalism may have provided a range of instruments to aid colonial rule; in its more recent revivalist forms to aid Asian nation-states in their search for an essential characteristic differentiating them from their Western counterparts and from each other, a case of being more Oriental than the rest. But, a theoretical understanding requires going beyond these functional aspects of Orientalism to the source of the universal/particular antinomy, analyzed here as its third coordinate.4
