TY - CHAP AB - As a fountainhead of postcolonial scholarship, Edward Said has profoundly impacted multiple disciplines. This chapter makes a case for why sociologists should (re)read Edward Said, paying specific attention to his warning about the inevitably violent interactions between knowledge and power in historic and current imperial contexts. Drawing on Said and other postcolonial theorists, we propose a threefold typology of potential violence associated with the production of knowledge: (1) the violence of essentialization, (2) epistemic violence, and (3) the violence of apprehension. While postcolonial theory and sociological and anthropological writing on reflexivity have highlighted the former two dangers, we urge social scientists to also remain wary of the last. We examine the formation of structures of authoritative knowledge during the French Empire in North Africa, the British Empire in India, and the American interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan during the “Global War on Terror,” paying close attention to how synchronic instances of apprehension (more or less accurate perception or recognition of the “other”) and essentialization interact in the production of diachronic essentialist and epistemic violence. We conclude by calling for a post-orientalist form of reflexivity, namely that sociologists, whether they engage as public intellectuals or not, remain sensitive to the fact that the production and consumption of sociological knowledge within a still palpable imperial framework makes all three violences possible, or even likely. VL - 24 SN - 978-1-78190-603-3, 978-1-78190-604-0/0198-8719 DO - 10.1108/S0198-8719(2013)0000024015 UR - https://doi.org/10.1108/S0198-8719(2013)0000024015 AU - Guhin Jeffrey AU - Wyrtzen Jonathan ED - Julian Go PY - 2013 Y1 - 2013/01/01 TI - The Violences of Knowledge: Edward Said, Sociology, and Post-Orientalist Reflexivity T2 - Postcolonial Sociology T3 - Political Power and Social Theory PB - Emerald Group Publishing Limited SP - 231 EP - 262 Y2 - 2024/04/23 ER -