Modernist exile is better explained by modernist self-image than by postcolonial conditions

Evidence

With regard to his fictions and his general political stance, I think, this personal detail is to be seen not so much in relation to coloniality and irs aftermath, nor with reference to the issue of dictatorship per se, bur in the highly pressurizing perspective of modernism itself, which has been framed so very largely by self-exiles and emigres- James and Conrad, Pound and Eliot, Picasso and Dali, Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and so on - who had experienced the same kind of ‘suffocation’ in their own spaces of this globe, and were subsequently to leave behind immense resources of genre and vocabulary for delineating that predominant image of the modern artist who lives as a literal stranger in a foreign and impersonal city and who, on the one hand, u~es the condition of exile as the basic metaphor for modernity and even for the human condition itself, while, on the other, writing obsessively, copiously, of that very land which had been declared ‘suffocating’ Nor was ‘the East’, and the itch to say some ‘last words’ about it, ever far from the imaginative topography of modernism. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 523

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Early modernist exile retained tragic intentionality that postmodern exile lacks — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 234; Orientalists’ self-image as individual visionaries concealed their shared colonial project — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 598; The postcolonial describes a world condition rather than a theory or identity — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 52

Broader Connections

• Early modernist exile retained tragic intentionality that postmodern exile lacks #qualifies (0.80) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 234
• The postcolonial describes a world condition rather than a theory or identity #qualifies (0.75) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 52
• Orientalists’ self-image as individual visionaries concealed their shared colonial project #corroborates (0.72) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 598