 In the article " Who is Afraid of Edward Said ? " , <unk> Pati said that in establishing ethnicity and cultural background as tests of authority and objectivity in studying the Orient , Edward Said drew attention to his own ethnic and cultural identities as a Palestinian man and as a colonial <unk> from the Mandate of Palestine , the British Middle East . In the article " <unk> and <unk> : Colonial Discourse Theory and the Historiography of the British Empire " , D. A. Washbrook said that Said 's Anglophone education ( British and American ) disqualified him from writing about the Orient by virtue of his own arguments in Orientalism ; Said had lived most of his adult life in the U.S. as a university professor , but argued that : " any and all representations ... are embedded , first , in the language , and then in the culture , institutions , and political ambience of the <unk> ... [ and are ] interwoven with a great many other things besides ' The Truth ' , which is , itself , a representation " . That excessive cultural relativism had trapped the academic Said , and his post @-@ colonial theorist followers , in a " web of solipsism " , which limits him and them to speak only of cultural " representations " , whilst simultaneously allowing Said and cohort to deny the existence of any objective truth about the Orient . 
