Colonial and post-colonial categories mask divergent intellectual trajectories spanning both eras

Evidence

These categories have no analytic value, or theoretical status, when they are mobilized to homogenize very complex structures of intellectual productions or the trajectories and subjectivities of individual writers and critics or broad intellectual strata, of the kind Said suggests in his essay. For particular intellectuals or clusters of them, colonial cultural ambience can last far beyond the moment of decolonization; for others, rejection of cultural dominance of the colonizing country can take place – and often does take place – well before the actual dissolution of the colonial state. Careers of historians and teachers like Susobhan Sarkar, sociologists like A.R. Desai, militants and intellectuals like E.M.S. Namboodripad, not to speak of D.D. Kosambi – mathematician, Sanskritist, anthropologist, historian of ancient India – span many years of both the colonial and the post-colonial periods, and none of them, let alone scores of others, displays the kind of cut-and-dried characteristics that Said attaches so neatly to his category of ‘colonial’ and ‘post-colonial’ intellectuals. Kosambi started writing roughly at the same times as C.L.R. James, Irfan Habib roughly at the same time as Ranajit Guha; the kind of distinction Said makes tells us nothing about these other trajectories. He simply inflates differences of individual formation and attitude into meaningless global typologies. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 385

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the general critique of periodization and categorical essentialism in postcolonial theory, and to the reader’s interest in falsifiable claims over schematic typologies. — connects to: Postcolonial literary theory’s rapid shift from nationalism to poststructuralism concealed material world dynamics — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 163; Said’s colonial and postcolonial intellectual categories erase concrete non-metropolitan trajectories

Related

• Said’s colonial and postcolonial intellectual categories erase concrete non-metropolitan trajectories (similarity 0.90)
• Postcolonial status denotes structural state shifts, not mere birth after decolonization (similarity 0.84)
• Poststructuralism’s rise in colonial literary theory conceals rather than explains its material-economic context (similarity 0.83)
• Postcolonial theory recasts decolonization as a literary-critical rather than political contest (similarity 0.82)
• Postcolonial theory’s own binary can reproduce the categories it aims to dissolve (similarity 0.82)
• Postcolonial literary theory obscures the political and economic materialities determining it (similarity 0.81)
• Postcolonial theory lacks a systematic periodization of its own practices. (similarity 0.81)
• Culturalist postcolonial labeling is arrant idealism that levels history (similarity 0.81)
• Postcolonial literary theory’s rapid shift from nationalism to poststructuralism concealed material world dynamics (similarity 0.80)
• Postcolonial criticism developed a distinctive, often impenetrable prose style (similarity 0.80)
• Postcolonial theory’s turn to representation displaced study of imperialist political economy (similarity 0.80)
• The category of the colonial subject collapses if colonialism is not fully constitutive. (similarity 0.80)
• Colonialism produced both a decrying intelligentsia and a false nationalism (similarity 0.80)
• Many colonial-period intellectuals stood outside the Western tradition. (similarity 0.79)
• Postcolonial subdisciplines emerged by distancing themselves from anti-imperialist activist politics and economics (similarity 0.79)