Dismissing Orientalism as bad faith ignores its material scholarly functions.

Evidence

The damage Orientalism often did can now be undone by superior scholarship, if and when we ourselves produce such scholarship, but the Orientalist scholarship as such cannot simply be dismissed as an exercise of bad faith, any more than the first Farsi translations of some of those same texts can be dismissed because they were done under Muslim kings in a ‘foreign’ language. … A study of these various traditions of translation - under the Mughals in Farsi, in English and German during the British period, and into modern languages of India from numerous sires during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries -would in fact constitute an important area of comparatism in the study of Indian Literature, and might demonstrate the weaknesses as well as the strengths of Orientalisr scholarship in ways that have been suppressed in contemporary debates. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 1139

Categorization

• SEED: A comparative study of translation traditions (Mughal Farsi, colonial English/German, modern Indian languages) could be an essay angle materializing the reader’s materialist critique of discourse-first postcolonial theory.
• XREF: connects to: Anti-Orientalist critics ignored the actual scholarly merits of Orientalist findings — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists…, 544; Orientalism criticism became a politicized ad hominem charge, not an epistemic critique — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 136

Broader Connections

• Anti-Orientalist critics ignored the actual scholarly merits of Orientalist findings #corroborates (0.85) — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 544
• Orientalism criticism became a politicized ad hominem charge, not an epistemic critique #corroborates (0.80) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 136