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Under the connecting feeling of tropical heat and vertical sunlights, I brought together all creatures, birds, beasts, reptiles, all trees and plants, usages and appearances, that are found in all tropical regions, and assembled them together in China or Indostan. From kindred feelings, I soon brought Egypt and all her gods under the same law. [. . .] I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.1
THOMAS DE QUINCEY'S OPIUM NIGHTMARES REPORTED to sensational acclaim in his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) have become a touchstone of Romantic Orientalism in the wake of Edward Said's seminal work Orientalism (1978). In a passage which finds quotation in all the standard anthologies of Romantic literature, one may recognize a formative expression of a stereotypical English view of a teeming, undifferentiated, and deeply repulsive Orient: the attitudinal basis, as Said has argued, for Orientalism's imperialist progression through the nineteenth century. Under the stimulus of opium, it would appear that the entire panoply of Eastern "usages and appearances" were lumped together by De Quincey in a way that corresponds to Said's influential thesis. Despite the controversial reception of Said's work and his subsequent qualification of it in some respects, this fundamental binary separation between East and West is an aspect of his critique that he has stood by in later publications, and it remains influential as a basic parameter of postcolonial criticism:
Throughout the exchange between Europeans and their 'others' that began systematically half a millennium ago, the one idea that has scarcely varied is that there is an 'us' and a 'them', each quite settled, clear, unassailably self-evident [...] the division goes back to Greek thought about barbarians, but whoever originated this kind of 'identity' thought by the nineteenth century it had become the hallmark of imperialist cultures as well as those cultures trying to resist the encroachments of Europe.2
Said's insistence on the cleavage between East and West is, of course, crucial to his critique, and without admission of it, his thesis fails (somewhat paradoxically) to cohere. Yet he himself is imprecise about the origins of "this kind of 'identity' thought," as he styles it - though he is clear that it is...