Said’s Rushdie defense contradicted his own critique of representation

Evidence

The odd thing, of course, is that Edward Said, who had given us such a powerful narrative of literary representations as integral to the imperialist systems of power, and who in writing Covering Islam had been so very sensitive about the coverage of Islam in the Western media as to have ignored the domestic criminalities of Islamic regimes in the course of his denunciations of those media, now championed, because the superior sanctity of literature was involved, the novelist’s absolute right to write as he pleases, regardless of the novelist’s own location in relation to the corporate world of global representations and the British imperial state. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 410

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A tight double bind: the critic of imperialist representation, who denied Western literature’s autonomy, grants the novelist absolute autonomy precisely to defend a work that was used to attack Muslim immigrants in Britain and was circulated by that imperialist state. This tension is worth long reflection on the politics of literary sanctity.
• XREF: connects to: The Rushdie affair exposed metropolitan Left cultural nationalism as selective about its martyrs — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 150

Related

• The Rushdie affair exposed metropolitan Left cultural nationalism as selective about its martyrs (similarity 0.84)
• Rushdie’s English and prestige were used against British Muslim immigrants (similarity 0.84)
• Said’s post-Orientalism rage made the solitary Western-city writer the sole redeemer figure (similarity 0.82)
• Western literary leftists defended Iran only after the Rushdie fatwa (similarity 0.79)
• Said judged Western media coverage of Muslim executions as worse than the executions (similarity 0.79)
• Said made cultural-imperialism critique respectable by speaking the university’s language (similarity 0.79)