Orientalism’s totalizing victim narrative erases home-country wrongs and oppositional histories like Marxism
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
Categorization
- SEED: Possible essay angle: the ideological economy of ‘primal innocence’ narratives among diasporic academics — how a totalizing oppressor/victim frame absorbs internal critique.
- XREF: connects to: Orientalism’s totalizing discourse critique erases all sites of resistance and liberation; Orientalist expertise erases politics, economics, and class from Oriental realities — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 300; Orientalist historiography equates all change with Westernization and erases anti-colonial resistance — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 768 (+2 more)
Broader Connections
- Repudiating Marxism reframed global power as a West-non-West relation of nations rather than classes
#corroborates(0.85) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 70 - Orientalist expertise erases politics, economics, and class from Oriental realities
#expands(0.80) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 300 - Orientalist historiography equates all change with Westernization and erases anti-colonial resistance
#complicates(0.75) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 768