Attributing agency to colonized natives smuggles in the modernization theory that subjugated them

Evidence

The theory has so far utterly failed, and will continue to fail, to produce one instance in which the agency of the non-European succeeded in rebuffing the colonialists’ assault. To be intelligible, even possible, agency must always be presumed to operate only within the very system of power in which the agent operates. Conversely, there can be no agency from outside power, whatever form that exteriority may take. If we accept the fact of profound and structural transformations on the colonized grounds (against which massive resistance utterly failed) then we must be ready to accept that attributions of agency to the oppressed natives are tantamount to inscribing onto them and their history a modernization theory of progress, the very theory, the very theology, that subjugated them in the first place. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 211

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely paradigm-shifting argument: agency is only legible within the power system it opposes, so crediting native agency to resistance retroactively adopts the colonizer’s modernization frame.
• XREF: Echoes Audre Lorde’s ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,’ which the passage itself gestures toward in its final sentence.