Formerly colonized and suppressed peoples now speak for themselves rather than being spoken for.

Evidence

The important point, however, is that a largely unexamined but serious rift has opened in the public consciousness between the old ideas of Western hegemony (of which the system of Orientalism was a part) on the one hand, and newer ideas that have taken hold among subaltern and disadvantaged communities and among a wide sector of intellectuals, academics, and artists, on the other. It is now very strikingly no longer the case that the lesser peoples—formerly colonized, enslaved, suppressed—are silent or unaccounted for except by senior European or American males. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 874

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Connects to Gayatri Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ — the subaltern term is invoked directly here; useful scaffold for subaltern studies within Islamophobia literature.

Related

• Colonial rulers systematically silence native speech by labeling speakers as agitators. (similarity 0.81)
• The Occident-Orient binary describes contested interpretations, not real monolithic blocks (similarity 0.81)
• The Orient’s effective absence from Western culture enables the Orientalist’s presence and authority. (similarity 0.79)
• Said showed that representing colonized others is itself an act of power. (similarity 0.79)
• Reverse Orientalism treats the oppressed as unfractioned good and serves development agencies (similarity 0.78)
• Said’s critique of Orientalism also suppressed Arab scholars and drew on Arab precursors (similarity 0.78)
• Denied the chance to speak, the subaltern strains hard to gain that voice (similarity 0.78)