Said contradicts himself by also crediting the prior critics he dismisses.

Evidence

I must confess, though, that Said’s irrepressible penchant for saying entirely contrary things in the same text, appealing to different audiences simultaneously but with the effect that each main statement cancels out the other, is in evidence in this essay as much as anywhere else. The sweeping statement which I have just quoted stands in a curiously unresolved relationship with the following, which we also find in this same essay: At bottom, what I said in Orienta/ism had been said before me by A. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 714

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: how ‘contradictory rhetoric appealing to different audiences simultaneously’ functions as the textual signature of strategic essentialism — a bicameral address that lets each claim be denied.
• XREF: Ahmad’s charge that contradictory double-address lets each statement cancel the other prefigures Spivak’s own retraction/qualification of strategic essentialism. — connects to: Said conceded his Orientalism arguments had all been made by earlier non-Western critics — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 715; Said contradicts Orientalism by treating Western literatures as autonomous. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 915

Broader Connections

• Said conceded his Orientalism arguments had all been made by earlier non-Western critics #corroborates (0.95) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 715
• Said contradicts Orientalism by treating Western literatures as autonomous. #contradicts (0.80) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 915