Saidism without Said: <italic>Orientalism</italic> and U.S. Diplomatic History

Abstract

AMERICAN DIPLOMATIC HISTORIANS may not be interested in Edward Said, but he is interested in them. While Orientalism was primarily a study of British and French representations of Middle Eastern Others in nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Said nevertheless devoted a good deal of space to period after 1945, when American power supplanted that of Great Britain and France, and Americans, he argued, inherited Western Orientalist apparatus. American Orientalism went well beyond vaguely populist stereotypes that Arabs or Muslims were prone to violence, incapable of rational thought, untrustworthy, devious, and unclean. Instead, the Middle East experts who advise [U.S.] policymakers are imbued with Orientalism, almost to a person. Since 1978, as Said has refined his thinking about imperialism and paid increasing attention to its American version, he has read broadly in field of U.S. foreign relations. Footnotes in his Culture and Imperialism (1993) include works by William Appleman Williams, Richard Van Alstyne, Walter LaFeber, Michael Hunt, and Paul Kennedy, all of them scholars of American foreign relations.1 Said's interest in history of U.S. foreign policy has apparently not been reciprocated. Articles published over past twenty years in journal Diplomatic History, house organ for Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), contain only a few references to Orientalism, most of them charitable but cursory. Akira Iriye, who has studied influence of culture on United StatesJapan relations in twentieth century, made a glancing reference to Orientalismn in his 1979 SHAFR presidential address. Diplomatic frequently publishes pleas by senior historians for greater conceptual scope in field. In one of these essays, John Lewis Gaddis managed to invoke Stephen Jay Gould, Freeman Dyson, and Douglas Adams-author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy-but not Said. Michael Hunt called for Internationalizing U.S. Diplomatic History in 1991without Said. In a 1994 essay, Emily S. Rosenberg used cultural analysis, in a manner reminiscent of Said, to connect two post-World War II films to interna-