Said subordinates class and gender to race in analyses of imperial rule

Evidence

Thus, if ‘Orientalism’ was initially posited as something .of an original ontological flaw in the European psyche, Said was eventually to declare: ‘in the relationship between the ruler and the ruled in the imperial or colonial or racial sense, race takes precedence over both class and gender I have always felt that the problem of emphasis and relative importance took precedence over the need to establish one’s feminist credentials.’-H That contemptuous phrase, ‘establish one’s feminist credentials’, rakes care of gender quite definitively, as imperialism itself is collapsed into a ‘racial sense’ In a Nietzschean world, virtually anything is possible. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 824

Categorization

• XREF: Said’s race-takes-precedence claim is exactly the discourse-first reduction the reader is tracking against strategic essentialism — where race/identity essentialism overrides class as the analytic category. Connects to Spivak’s own later worries about essentialism hardening into residence. — connects to: Said subordinated class and gender analysis to race in his later theorizing
• QUESTION: Is Said’s ‘race takes precedence’ move itself a version of strategic essentialism hardening into doctrinal residence — and does Ahmad’s quotation of it show the term collapsing into exactly what it warned against?

Broader Connections

• Said subordinated class and gender analysis to race in his later theorizing #corroborates (1.00)