Said’s post-Orientalism rage made the solitary Western-city writer the sole redeemer figure

Evidence

The enormity of this shift is puzzling. The continued American hostility towards the Arab world on the one hand, the sentencing of Rushdie by Ayatollah Khomeini on the other, combined with the failure of most people in Asia, Africa and the Arab world to do combat on Rushdie’s behalf, seem to have given rise to an extraordinary fury against West and non-West alike, with the figure of the lonely writer in the Western city – and the uncommitted reader of novels in that same city – eventually emerging as the only figures of redemption. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 379

Categorization

• XREF: Relates to debates about exilic intellectual identity and the politics of cosmopolitanism. — connects to: Said’s later work privileges Western-based writers while raging against non-Western societies
• SEED: Angle: how the Rushdie affair restructured Western-left solidarity with non-Western causes.

Related

• Said’s later work privileges Western-based writers while raging against non-Western societies (similarity 0.87)
• Said’s later essays reversed his Orientalism critique into a desire for Western location (similarity 0.83)
• Said’s Rushdie defense contradicted his own critique of representation (similarity 0.82)
• The Rushdie affair exposed metropolitan Left cultural nationalism as selective about its martyrs (similarity 0.81)
• Said studied non-Western literature only as evidence of Western empire (similarity 0.79)
• Said’s Orientalism denies colonized agency while criticizing the West for silencing it. (similarity 0.79)
• Said’s Orientalism was written from a perspective of personal loss and defeated national identity (similarity 0.79)
• Western literary leftists defended Iran only after the Rushdie fatwa (similarity 0.78)