ABSTRACT
The debate regarding orientalism, launched by its critics in the period of decolonization that followed the end of the Second World War, proved both stimulating and enlightening, giving rise on occasion to strong opinion and firm conclusion. In Germany, towards the end of the nineteenth century, a rapid expansion in institutional forms of orientalism occurred at a time when the German state was for the first time seriously contemplating the creation of a great overseas empire; and in Russia a similar development occurred in the period of Russian expansion in Central Asia. In formalising orientalism's discursive regularities and the dominant system of its ideological constellation, Edward Said's text cannot account for the complexities of its micropractices; that is, the specific but crucial points of its dispersed network of representations that include strategic irregularities, historical discontinuities, and discursive heterogeneity.
