South Asian postcolonial scholars largely avoided the term orientalism in favor of local analysis

Evidence

This broadening of Said’s Orientalism to the study of colonialism in general as a discursive phenomenon has already proved to be among the most important achievements of scholarship at the turn of the twenty-first century. Many of the scholars furthering this line of inquiry (though sometimes in ways emphatically contrary to Said’s) themselves have non-Western, “colonial” antecedents and are writing from a postcolonial position as residents either of the former colonies or of their diasporas in the West. Some, like Leila Abu-Lughod or Talal Asad stem, as Said did, from the Arab world, but most are South Asian: Aijaz Ahmed, Arjun Appadurai, Homi Bhabha, Partha Chatterjee, Gyan Prakash, Gayatri Spivak, Gauri Viswanathan, and others. Apart from various intellectual reasons, these authors’ subcontinental filiation may be why they have shied away from the term orientalism, generally preferring to focus on local Indian conditions in the context of global influences, with potential comparisons made not only to the hub of Said’s Orient—Islamic North Africa, and West Asia—but to any other part of the Third World and even the Third World diaspora in the West. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 82

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader interest in how scholarly frameworks get adopted or avoided depending on scholars’ geographic and colonial antecedents.