Postcolonial theory’s own binary can reproduce the categories it aims to dissolve

Evidence

When Said published Orientalism in the late 1970s, he was, of course, writing within a context of cultural analysis made famous decades earlier by the politically charged works of Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, and Albert Memmi. Their works of the late 1950s and 1960s were the first to portray the lives led by those subjected to European colonialism, which only recently had collapsed. The power of books like Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks and Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized created a canon for postcolonial studies. But, as Robert Young writes, since the appearance of these books “postcolonial criticism has constructed two antithetical groups, the colonizer and the colonized, self and Other, with the second only knowable through a necessarily false representation, a Manichean division that threatens to reproduce the static, essentialist categories it seeks to undo.” — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 74

Categorization

• DEFINE: Frames the Manichean colonizer/colonized divide that later chapters nuance for Egypt versus Sudan.
• XREF: connects to: A state’s own inclusionary categories become the vehicles of its dissolution — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 1255; Said’s colonial and postcolonial intellectual categories erase concrete non-metropolitan trajectories — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 858; the MOC “The Word Is a Fence: Language as Battleground, Property, and Partition”