There was a New Yorker article from 2021 on Said and Aijaz Ahmad I ripped a page out of, and here it is. It’s page 86.
I remember reading the Ahmad critiques of many things and liking it. The New Yorker writer reminds us that Said was not aware of Asian, African, or Latin American thought, or even Indian thought that contributed to the formation of Orientalism. He believed in the same things many conservatives do: Western civilization started in ancient Greece, went to Renaissance Italy, and then to Enlightenment France.
Ahmad “examined why and how a book with many obvious and great flaws became a cult classic among academics” (86). For one thing, Said’s interest in representations rather than material interests, and his prioritizing of race over class and gender, were useful to upwardly mobile academics coming to the US from the developing world. As I have noted also, these men were often members of the ruling classes in their home countries, “even of classes that had flourished under colonial rule.”
So the book’s narrative of oppression got these guys higher salaries, better jobs, and so on: “denouncing the Orientalist West had become one way of finding a tenured job in it.” Also, it was a very lit-crit, textual attitude: you critiqued the humanist tradition in class and, as R. Rorty pointed out, you felt that exempted you from real-world activism.
Said himself wondered about this, and about whether the book encouraged fixations on personal identity in academia. As we remember, he (like others) also questioned post-colonialism as a category, since so much colonialism was still in full force.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 