Said reads Marx’s sympathy for Asia as blocked by Orientalist discourse

Evidence

Said’s treatment of Marx is too impressionistic ever to come down co any real chronology, but if I understand him correctly he seems to be <;t.ssercing chat Marx .starud with ‘some fellow feeling’ for ‘poor Asia’ but then gave in to a ‘censor’ (Orientalism) which served co ‘chase away che sympathy’ and replaced it with chat ‘lapidary definicion’ Marx, .ir seems, scarred in one place and arrived ac anorher: what is rehearsed here for us appears co be a chronology of submission, or at least blockage. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 992

Categorization

• XREF: This is Ahmad critiquing exactly the discourse-determinist reading of a materialist thinker, the core move the reader is researching; connects to Said’s Orientalism and to the strategic-essentialism question about whether discourse frames occlude material/class analysis. — connects to: Said distorted Marx’s writings in Orientalism — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists…, 531; Marx’s orientalism concerned land tenure and government, not racial feeling — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists…, 531; Anti-imperialist historians of India contradict the portrayal of Marx as an Orientalist — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 73 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Anti-imperialist historians of India contradict the portrayal of Marx as an Orientalist #responds-to (0.80) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 73
• Said distorted Marx’s writings in Orientalism #expands (0.78) — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 531
• Marx’s orientalism concerned land tenure and government, not racial feeling #complicates (0.72) — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 531