The Gatekeeping Politics of “Good” Historicism: Early Modern Orientalism and “The Diary of Master Thomas Dallam”

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.