The substantive triumph of Orientalism was its exposing to a broad audience the extent to which the telling of history, the act of summation and synthesis into narrative from disparate strands of detail and fact, was not itself a neutral, disinterested act, but rather an exercise of power in the world. As Said himself explained in an afterword to the book, written in 1994, “The construction of identity is bound up with the disposition of power and powerlessness in each society, and is therefore anything but mere academic woolgathering.”
