Over the past couple decades, countless critics have disputed the applicability of Edward Said’s Orientalism to Western representations of the early modern East. Such representations, they argue, are characterized by non-authoritarian, cross-cultural negotiations, not the later Western colonial dominance central to Said’s analysis. The problem, however, is that this otherwise useful re-orientation depends on simplifying distortions of Said’s theoretical premise and interpretive methodology. Rather than recognize Said’s Palestinian identity position as legitimately defining his postcolonial historicism, these critics dismiss his conclusions as anachronistic: simply stated, as “bad” historicism. Characterized by what I term the gatekeeping politics of “good” historicism, such dismissals, I argue, represent the political denial of Saidian and other personally inflected forms of historicist criticism as a condition of professional entry and socio-political legitimacy. Rejecting this condition, I conclude by exploring the Orientalist implications of “The Diary of Master Thomas Dallam,” an early modern text widely praised as pre-Orientalist.

中文翻译：

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“好”历史主义的守门政治：早期现代东方主义与“托马斯·达拉姆大师日记”

在过去的几十年里，无数的批评家对爱德华·赛义德的东方主义在西方对现代早期东方的描绘中的适用性提出了质疑。他们认为，这种表述的特点是非专制的、跨文化的谈判，而不是后来成为赛义德分析核心的西方殖民统治。然而，问题在于，这种有用的重新定位取决于对赛义德理论前提和解释方法的简化扭曲。这些批评者没有承认赛义德的巴勒斯坦身份地位合法地定义了他的后殖民历史主义，而是将他的结论视为不合时宜：简单地说，是“坏”的历史主义。我认为，以我所说的“好”历史主义的守门政治为特征，这种解雇，我认为，代表对赛迪安和其他个人影响的历史主义批评形式的政治否认，作为职业进入和社会政治合法性的条件。拒绝这种情况，我最后探讨了《托马斯·达拉姆大师日记》的东方主义含义，这是一部被广泛赞誉为前东方主义的早期现代文本。