Non-Western elites’ self-essentializing claims intersect Orientalist knowledge in tangled ways

Evidence

Within the realm of discourse over the past two hundred years, though, the relationship between the Brahminical and the Islamic high texrualities, the Orientalist knowledges of these rexrualities, and their modern reproductions in Western as well as non-Western countries have produced such a wilderness of mirrors that we need the most incisive of operations, the most delicate of dialectics, to disaggregate these densities. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 756

Categorization

• QUESTION: Directly relevant to research: the ‘wilderness of mirrors’ between Brahminical/Islamic traditions, their Orientalist schematizations, and their modern non-Western reproductions destabilizes any clean distinction between authentic and strategic essentialism, or between resisting and reproducing the discourse.
• XREF: connects to: Conflating all Western knowledge production with Orientalism repeats essentialism and obscures historical specificity

Broader Connections

• Conflating all Western knowledge production with Orientalism repeats essentialism and obscures historical specificity #qualifies (0.75)