The idea of a unitary ‘East’ is a colonial figment

Evidence

That he begins the passage with a suggestion of self-mockery does not really retrieve the banal character of the assertion, since the book is replete with all sorts of banal statements about ‘the East’, including the assertion that the English word ‘Shame’ falls far short of the Urdu word ‘Sharam’ because the latter is, as sentiment and notion and normative conduct, characteristically Eastern, hence exceeding the Western capacities of cognition and linguistic formulation; ‘they’ live after the death of tragedy, we are told, while ‘we’ presumably live in the grip of it. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 234

Categorization

• DEFINE: The passage exposes how claims about untranslatable Eastern essence (Sharam vs. Shame) recapitulate colonial binarism.