Theoretical frameworks can objectify the very people they claim to describe
Evidence
Now, I was born in India and I write poetry in Urdu, a language not commonly understood among US intellectuals. So I said to myself: ‘All? … necessarily?’ It felt odd. Matters became much more curious, however. For the further I read, the more I realized, with no little chagrin, that the man whom I had for so long, so affectionately, albeit from a physical distance, taken as a comrade was, in his own opinion, my civilizational Other. It was not a good feeling. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 150
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak’ and the broader debate on who gets to theorize about the subaltern, and to Edward Said’s concern in Orientalism with how Western theory constructs its objects. — connects to: Totalizing theoretical claims can erase the theorist’s professed comrades
- DEEPTHINKING: The lived-experience tension here — a theorist discovering he is the object of another theorist’s category — is a genuinely striking, defamiliarizing reading experience, though the point resolves fairly quickly.