Said casts class, nation, and gender as coercive identities that aesthetic consumption must escape

Evidence

All such mimicries (African and Asian literatures) and such coercive identities (the state, certainly, but also nation, gender, class) must be left behind. Once these are shed, the real business of literature can begin: … The reader and writer of literature no longer needs to tie him or herself to an image of the poet or scholar in isolation, secure, stable, national in identity, class, gender, or profession, but can think and experience with … Genet in Palestine or Algeria, with Tayeb Salih as a black man in London, with Jamaica Kincaid in the white world, with Rushdie in India and Britain, and so on. To paraphrase from a remark made by Auerbach in one of his last essays, our philological home is the world, and not the nation or even the individual writer. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 916

Categorization

• XREF: This is the target of Ahmad’s materialist critique — Said’s transcendence of identity into consumption resembles the strategic-essentialism-then-retraction bind under study, but without the explicit ironic frame. — connects to: Collective identities like class, race, nation and gender positioned the individual self — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity…, 188; Culture means suspending objectification, yet criticism re-objectifies what it studies; Art’s autonomy internalizes the very social domination it claims to escape — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 296

Broader Connections

• Collective identities like class, race, nation and gender positioned the individual self #expands (0.80) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 188
• Art’s autonomy internalizes the very social domination it claims to escape #complicates (0.80) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 296
• Culture means suspending objectification, yet criticism re-objectifies what it studies #qualifies (0.70)