Exilic and comprador intellectuals both traffic dialectically between center and periphery
Evidence
Said’s exilic intellectual defies the power relation operative in his domain, whereas Appiah’s comprador intellectual is subservient to it. The one has migrated to the heart of darkness, where the empire manages its domestic and foreign affairs; the other has stayed behind and provides his services on the colonial site. But if we place Malcolm X’s analysis between Said’s and Appiah’s, we come to a far more accurate conception of both the exilic and the comprador intellectuals, because each is involved in a dialectical traffic between the center and the periphery (thus collapsing both into one world). — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 222
Categorization
- XREF: The method — triangulating Said, Appiah, and Malcolm X to transcend a center-periphery binary — is a model for comparative intellectual history. — connects to: The postmodern periphery is often more creatively potent than the center — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 289
- SEED: Angle: ‘the house Negro is a global category’ — how the exilic/comprador pairing explains migration patterns of contemporary talent from the Global South.
Related
- Globalization erases the center-periphery distinction defining comprador intellectuals (similarity 0.84)
- The center-periphery axis no longer maps intellectual location (similarity 0.82)
- Most intellectual migration from the periphery serves mainstream ambition, not adversarial critique. (similarity 0.80)
- Exilic intellectual identity cuts both ways for every Said there are ten Ajamis (similarity 0.80)