Pertinent.
“This re-barbarization of the outsider takes the form of liberal sensibility. In learned discourse it takes the form of appropriating the anti-orientalist theses of Edward Said: in this way orientals, especially those who describe themselves, quite implausibly, as postcolonial, in objective complicity with fundamentalist priests of authenticity, merge into the vicious cycle of this discourse of singularity; orientals are thus reorientalized in a traffic of mirror images between postmodernists and neo-orientalists speaking for difference, and native orientals ostentatiously displaying their badges of authenticity, in a play of exoticism from outside and self-parody from the inside. I have shown this in various writings to be a species of false memory, of invented memory marketed like the retro features of the 1996 Vespa. In this context, the discourse of culturalist specificity – instead of that of economic and social inequality and inequity – devolves into a post-1989 postulate concerning the congenital incapacity for modernity in a world of deregulation, hence for the inappropriateness of the economic, social and political treatment of economic, political and social problems arising from the recent forms of globalization and deregulation, and giving rise to the spectres of terrorism and immigration. The liberal-economic, free market proposals put forward as measures which will somehow, as if by the natural history of humanity so fated, cause this newer barbarism to disappear or at least render it invisible, seem in practice to be deepening the very socio-economic conditions that give rise to it.
The re-barbarization of the southerner transforms him or her, beyond history and the international inequity of resources, into tribal warrior, refugee, asylum seeker or illegal immigrant. The southerner thus rebarbarized turns into a terrorist and fundamentalist. Inept and incapable of development, the southerner becomes the pathetic victim of famine and anarchy, to which he or she is culturally predisposed. Uncivilized and only superficially touched by modernity, he or she becomes again prone to tribalism and to wars of ethnicity and religion, all construed as the results of a natural history beyond human agency. Once again, we encounter the banality of irresponsibility, and we encounter a barbarian construed as eternal when this construal itself is based on a system of relations which is mystified in the name of nature. Yet the ‘midwives’ of barbarian authenticity do not speak with the voice of nature, for nature has no voice, but of naturalism and of a deterministic natural history of the cultures of others; not of reality, but of virtual memory marketed. The aesthetic of exoticism and the distinctions based on wealth merge yet again.”
—Aziz Al-Azmeh, Islams and Modernities, 2009 edition, p. 61
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