The fallacy of argument ad antiquitam

The fallacy of argument ad antiquitam is "an illegitimate appeal to ages past in order to justify acts present or future" (Fischer, Historians' Fallacies, p. 297).

This used to mean using scholarly respect for the past to bolster your argument. In the post-colonial era it means using scholarly disrespect for the colonial past to bolster your argument.

The problem is the dependence of the history of Burma on scholarly work from the colonial era.

One way to avoid this dependence is to go back to the original sources and prepare detailed annotated translations of them, but the hard work behind translations doesn't seem to be valorized anymore in academia.

Grand theories well-marketed that hit the jackpot and turn the scholar into a superstar public intellectual of the stature of Foucault, a winner-take-all, celebrity approach to scholarship.

The Mists of Ramanna is such a winner-take-all crap shoot, attempting to discredit contemporary scholarship by likening it to colonial era scholarship

It is in the final analysis, a cheap rhetorical trick. Keep your colonial intellectual history separate.