Imperial agents can simultaneously rebel against authority and serve it

Evidence

Yet Burton’s legacy is more complex than individualism precisely because in his writing we can find exemplified the struggle between individualism and a strong feeling of national identification with Europe (specifically England) as an imperial power in the East. Assad sensitively points out that Burton was an imperialist, for all his sympathetic self-association with the Arabs; but what is more relevant is that Burton thought of himself both as a rebel against authority (hence his identification with the East as a place of freedom from Victorian moral authority) and as a potential agent of authority in the East. It is the manner of that coexistence, between two antagonistic roles for himself, that is of interest. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 497

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The coexistence of rebel and agent roles within one imperial subject is a genuinely dense mechanism — the East serves as both a place of freedom from Victorian authority and a site where that same individual becomes an agent of Western authority. This dual positioning is a subtle, non-obvious mechanism worth sitting with.
• XREF: This dual role — identifying with the colonized while serving the colonizer — connects to later Islamophobia readings on sympathy masking involvement in power, and echoes the Foucault-adjacent point about the subject being produced within relations of power even when rebelling.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 497