Critics ignore how literary theory legitimated colonial subjugation

Evidence

There is, I believe, a quite serious split in our critical consciousness today, which allows us to spend a great deal of time elaborating Carlyle’s and Ruskin’s aesthetic theories, for example, without giving attention to the authority that their ideas simultaneously bestowed on the subjugation of inferior peoples and colonial territories.… Unless we can comprehend how the great European realistic novel accomplished one of its principal purposes—almost unnoticeably sustaining the society’s consent in overseas expansion—… we will misread both the culture’s importance and its resonances in the empire, then and now. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 561

Categorization

• DEFINE: Exemplifies Said’s own articulation of the ‘split critical consciousness’ driving his project.
• XREF: connects to: Postcolonial literary theory obscures the political and economic materialities determining it — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 43