Imperial discourse recasts the colonized as half victim, half terrorist

Evidence

But this vision, in the case of Orienta/ism, gains further authority from the way it panders to the most sentimental, the most extreme forms of Third-Worldist nationalism. The book says nothing, of course, about any fault of our own, but anything we ourselves could remember - the bloodbath we conducted at the time of Partition, let us saysimply pales in comparison with this other Power which has victimized us and inferiorized us for two thousand five hundred years or more. So uncompromising is this book in its Third-Worldist passion that Marxism itself, which has historically given such sustenance to so many of the anti-imperialist movements of our time, can be dismissed, breezily, as a child ofOrientalism and an accomplice of British colonialism. How comforting such visions of one’s own pr.imal and permanent innocence are one can well imagine, because given what actually goes on in our countries, we do need a great deal of comforting. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 817 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Colonial rescue logic persists as ‘half victim, half terrorist’ duality — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 289; Imperial discourse changes enemies rather than merely destroying them — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 273; Imperial statesmen claimed a distinct category of problems for colonized peoples. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 104 (+9 more)

Broader Connections

• Orientalism’s totalizing victim narrative erases home-country wrongs and oppositional histories like Marxism #complicates (0.77) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 817
• Radicalization theories justify treating Muslims as an imperial scapegoat class #complicates (0.76)