Said made cultural-imperialism critique respectable by speaking the university’s language

Evidence

It has been Edward Said’s achievement to have brought this question of cultural imperialism to the very centre of the ongoing literary debates in the metropolitan university by posing it in terms that were acceptable to that university. Sections of the Right could still attack him, as they loudly did, but the liberal mainstream had to concede both that he knew his Spitzer and his Auerbach as well as they did, and that he certainly was not ‘propagandistic’ in the way the 1960s’ radicals usually were. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 430

Categorization

• SEED: An article angle: how a critic’s erudition and register, not just ideas, determines whether a field accepts a political critique.

Related

• Said’s career bridged liberal academia and avant-garde theory on an anti-Marxist basis (similarity 0.81)
• A fierce critic can inadvertently reinforce the very system he attacks. (similarity 0.81)
• Said frames anti-imperial resistance chiefly as cultural discourse and identity (similarity 0.80)
• Said’s imperialism critique only ever applies to Western empires. (similarity 0.79)
• Said’s Rushdie defense contradicted his own critique of representation (similarity 0.79)
• Said studied non-Western literature only as evidence of Western empire (similarity 0.78)
• Said centrally shaped literary theory on colonialism after Orientalism (similarity 0.78)