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🪵 The Threshold

Said's colonial and postcolonial intellectual categories erase concrete non-metropolitan trajectories

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tagsja-picks, contrarian_or_surprising, singleton, xref, factual_claims, trade, category/contrarian-or-surprising
aliases@hallaq_restating_2018, loc. 523

3 min read

Said’s colonial and postcolonial intellectual categories erase concrete non-metropolitan trajectories

Evidence

These categories have no analytic value, or theoretical status, when they are mobilized to homogenize very complex structures of intellectual productions or the trajectories and subjecriviries of individual writers and critics or broad intellectual strata, of the kind Said suggests in his essay. For particular intellectuals or clusters of them, colonial cultural ambience can last far beyond the moment of decolonization; for others, rejection of cultural dominance of the colonizing country can take placeand often does take place - well before the actual dissolution of the colonial state. Careers of historians and teachers like Susobhan Sarkar, sociologists like A.R. Desai, militants and intellectuals like E. M.S. Namboodripad, not to speak of D.O. Kosambi - mathematician, Sanskritist, anthropologist, historian of ancient Indiaspan many years of both the colonial and the post-colonial periods, and none of them, let alone scores of others, displays the kind of cut-and-dried characteristics that Said attaches so nearly to his category of ‘colonial’ and ‘post-colonial’ intellectuals. Kosambi starred writing roughly at the same rimes as C.L.R. James, Irfan Habib roughly at the same time as Ranajir Guha; the kind of distinction Said makes tells us norhing about these other trajectories. He simply inflates differences of individual formation and attitude into meaningless global typologies. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 858

Categorization

  • XREF: Concrete empirical counter-case to the reader’s research: actual non-Western intellectuals (Kosambi, Habib, Guha) did not occupy the essentialized colonial/postcolonial slots Said assigns, so the strategic-essentialist frame misdescribes material careers. — connects to: Poststructuralism’s rise in colonial literary theory conceals rather than explains its material-economic context — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 163; A constructed ideal intellectual combines Third World origin with metropolitan location — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 845; Colonial and post-colonial categories mask divergent intellectual trajectories spanning both eras — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 385 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

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