Reverse Orientalism treats the oppressed as unfractioned good and serves development agencies

Evidence

I think it is the problem of the legacy of Orientalism within imperialism. And I think it is reflected in the kind of Orientalism that simply thinks that the other side is all unfractioned good. And, in fact, I have pointed at this in another essay which has only been published in Swedish. I have pointed out there that this kind of crude national identity is regularly used by the development agencies to justify themselves in front of all kinds of opposition and also in front of benevolent people who share this kind of Orientalist presupposition. Well, you know, when one says “the Somalis asked for it,” “the Indians asked for it,” “the Bangladeshis asked for it”— in fact, nobody ever asks ”what Somalis?,” “what Bangladeshis?” And of course the opposition is always then described as a kind of monstrous enemy-of-the-people type thing. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 2421

Categorization

• XREF: Links Spivak’s critique of reverse-Orientalism to the race-struggle/strategic-essentialism thread from Society Must Be Defended and ‘Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography’ — the unfractioned-good image of the subaltern is the collective-essentialism problem.