Description is never ideologically neutral and was central to colonial mastery
Evidence
It was by assembling a monstrous machinery of descriptions – of our bodies, our speech acts, our habitats, our conflicts and desires, our politics, our socialities and sexualities, in fields as various as ethnology, fiction, photography, linguistics, political science – that those discourses were able to classify and ideologically master colonial subjects, enabling the transformation of descriptively verifiable multiplicity and difference into the ideologically felt hierarchy of value. To say, in short, that what one is presenting is ‘essentially descriptive’ is to assert a level of facticity which conceals its own ideology, and to prepare a ground from which judgements of classification, generalization and value can be made. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 156
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to postcolonial theory’s critique of ethnographic description — Clifford, Said’s Orientalism; resonates with the reader’s work on how narratives construct knowledge.
- DEEPTHINKING: The claim that ‘description’ conceals ideology while preparing the ground for value judgments is dense and paradigm-shifting about how knowledge is produced.