Anti-colonial critique before Said was overwhelmingly Marxist-affiliated

Evidence

The irrefutable fact about the period before Said’s intervention is that apart from the more obscurantist and indigenist kinds of anti-Westernist protests against European influence, the vast majority of the socially enlightened and politically progressive critiques of colonialism had been affiliated with either Marxism or, at least, with the general cultural anti-imperialism which Marxism, and the communist movement generally, had helped to bring about. Said’s break with that political tradition was sweeping indeed. Marx himself was dismissed in the book as yet another Orientalist, Marxism was swept aside as an unsavoury child of ‘historicism’, and the insights which had originally emanated from that tradition were now conjoined with Foucauldian Discourse Theory. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 320

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Ahmad compresses a paradigm shift — the shift from Marx to Foucault — into one dense paragraph that reframes Orientalism’s politics as a rupture from, not a deepening of, the anti-colonial tradition. Dense enough to sit with.
• XREF: connects to: Anti-colonial cultural critique existed for a century before Orientalism yet Said ignored it — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 709; Anti-war movements reduced socialism to anti-colonial nationalism — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 128; Anti-imperialist historians of India contradict the portrayal of Marx as an Orientalist (+3 more)

Related

• Anti-colonial cultural critique existed for a century before Orientalism yet Said ignored it (similarity 0.91)
• Colonial discourse analysis emerged from radical theory’s retreat from immediate activist struggles (similarity 0.90)
• Anti-colonial cultural criticism predates Orientalism in the colonized world (similarity 0.88)
• Anti-imperialist historians of India contradict the portrayal of Marx as an Orientalist (similarity 0.88)
• Said’s critique of Orientalism mirrors the procedures of his adversaries. (similarity 0.87)
• Said’s career bridged liberal academia and avant-garde theory on an anti-Marxist basis (similarity 0.86)
• Said centrally shaped literary theory on colonialism after Orientalism (similarity 0.84)
• Anti-colonial critique of culture predates Said by nearly a century outside Euro-America (similarity 0.84)
• Nietzschean theory retrofitted a postmodern anticolonialism that Marxist anti-imperialism already held (similarity 0.82)
• Said’s account makes colonialism an effect of discourse, not material power. (similarity 0.81)
• Said’s later essays reversed his Orientalism critique into a desire for Western location (similarity 0.81)
• Said’s Orientalism deploys incompatible Foucauldian and humanist origin-stories simultaneously. (similarity 0.81)
• Said frames anti-imperial resistance chiefly as cultural discourse and identity (similarity 0.81)
• Anti-Marx poststructuralist critique ignores how Indian historians read Marx (similarity 0.81)
• Said distanced himself from the label postcolonial in favor of anti-imperial (similarity 0.81)