Most intellectual migration from the periphery serves mainstream ambition, not adversarial critique.

Evidence

That is a nice phrase: ‘adversarial internationalization’ Unfortunately, its novelty serves to conceal the fact that there is usually no relationship between ‘the voyage in’ and any ‘adversarial’ activity. … The vast majority of immigrants and visitors’ who go from ‘the peripheries’ to the ‘Western centre’ in the United States either take no part in politics and scholarly endeavour or turn out to be right-wing people, well represented in the field of literature by Bharati Mukherjee; that a few do produce oppositional work should not serve to conceal the fact that the ‘scholarly work by immigrants or by visitors’ is overwhelmingly in the mould of mainstream Anglo-American scholarship. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 869

Categorization

• XREF: Directly counters Said’s romanticization of the migrant intellectual; parallels Ahmad’s wider materialist rebuttal of discourse-first postcolonial theory. — connects to: Exile and diaspora describe displacement, not wealthy migrants anywhere abroad — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 641

Broader Connections

• Exile and diaspora describe displacement, not wealthy migrants anywhere abroad #qualifies (0.75) — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 641