Said conflates voluntary emigration with forced exile to authorize Guha’s project.

Evidence

By the same token, however, it is best not to misrepresent personal preference as fate ordained by repression. Yet the ‘exile figure’ is central to the persona Said ascribes to Guha. For it is in this combination of comprador class origin, Western location, exiled self, and mastery of techniques that Said locates the productive and oppositional energies of the Subalternist project and its putative ability to overturn the entire trajectory of all the schools and tendencies previously obtaining in Indian historiography. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 877

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to strategic-essentialism research: Said constructs an essentialized ‘exile’ identity for Guha regardless of lived fact — a case of residence-in a projected identity. — connects to: Inflationary rhetoric turned exile into a synonym for voluntary migration — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 136

Broader Connections

• Inflationary rhetoric turned exile into a synonym for voluntary migration #exemplifies (0.85) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 136