A constructed ideal intellectual combines Third World origin with metropolitan location

Evidence

It is this growing ambivalence about nation and nationalismcombined with an even more surprising shift from a wholesale rejection of’the West’ to an equally wholesale assertion that the only authentic work that can be done in our time presumes (a) Third World origin, but combined with (b) metropolitan location - which should bear some scrutiny. The intellectual cited as an exemplary figure of our time in this latest construction, is, of course, Ranajit Guha, who is commended both for this initial origin in the Indian upper class and for his later location in the metropolitan university, but the autobiographical self-referentiality is quite unmistakable. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 845

Categorization

• XREF: “‘author reading” toward this research on the collective availability of ironic/strategic identity — connects to: Metropolitan institutions assemble and control most knowledge produced about the Third World; Globalization erases the center-periphery distinction defining comprador intellectuals — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 238; Intellectual originality can be a product of marginal social position — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 10 (+2 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: Spivak’s own placement in the metropole matters for strategic essentialism: does the term effectively require a metropolitan location to be deployed ironically - evidence it is only available to individuals relocated to the West?

Broader Connections

• Said’s colonial and postcolonial intellectual categories erase concrete non-metropolitan trajectories #complicates (0.85) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 858
• Metropolitan institutions assemble and control most knowledge produced about the Third World #complicates (0.80)
• Intellectual originality can be a product of marginal social position #expands (0.78) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 10
• Regional class structure determines the type of intellectual a region produces #complicates (0.75) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 276
• Globalization erases the center-periphery distinction defining comprador intellectuals #contradicts (0.72) — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 238