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IN THEORY: CLASSE, NATIONS, LITERATURES - AIJAZ AHMAD

Aijaz Ahmad is a well-known Marxist literary theorist and political commentator based

in India. Born in the state of Uttar Pradesh, India just before it

gained independence from British rule, Aijaz Ahmad along with his parents migrated

to Pakistan following partition. After his education he worked in various universities in US

and Canada. At present Aijaz Ahmad is Professorial Fellow at the Centre of Contemporary

Studies, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi and is visiting Professor

of Political Science at York University, Toronto. He also works as an editorial consultant

with the Indian newsmagazine Frontline and as a senior news analyst for the Indian

website News click. His works were:

1. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures - Verso

2. Lineages of the Present: Ideological and Political Genealogies of Contemporary

South Asia

3. Iraq, Afghanistan and the Imperialism of Our Time - LeftWord Books, New Delhi

4. On Communalism and Globalization-Offensives of the Far Right - Three Essays

Collective

5. A Singular Voice: Collected Writings of Michael Sprinker - Editor (with Fred Pfeil

and Modhumita Roy)

6. In Our Time: Empire, Politics, Culture

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In his book In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, Ahmad primarily discusses the role

of theory and theorists in the movement against colonialism and imperialism. Ahmad's

argument against those who uphold poststructuralism and postmodernist conceptions of

material history revolves around the fact that very little has been accomplished since the

advent of this brand of postcolonial inquiry. The book contains an especially polemical

critique of Frederic Jameson's argument in 'Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational

Capitalism" where Ahmad attacks Jameson on the grounds that Jameson's argument is

insufficiently theorized in its use of terms like "Third World" which appears to be defined

purely in terms of its experience of colonialism. This in turn leads Jameson to make hasty and

untenable generalizations about how all "third world literature' would necessarily function as

a national allegory that according to Jameson works as resistance to a system of global

postmodernism.

However Ahmad in his book expresses his chagrin at how his critique of Jameson has

been appropriated by Postcolonial scholars as an attack on Marxism, while Ahmad contends

that he takes issue with Jameson simply because his use of Marxism in the essay on Third

World Literature is not rigorous enough. The book also contains a lengthy critique of Edward

Said's Orientalism which Ahmad argues reproduces the very Liberal Humanist tradition that

it seeks to undermine in its selection of Western canonized texts that are critiqued for their

Orientalism, as this upholds the idea that Western culture is represented in its entirety through

those very texts. Furthermore, Ahmad asserts that by tracing Orientalist thought all the way

back to Ancient Greece it becomes unclear in Said's work whether Orientalism is a product of

Colonialism, or whether Colonialism is, in fact, a product of Orientalism.

After the Second World War, nationalism emerged as the principle expression of

resistance to Western imperialism in a variety of regions from the Indian subcontinent to

Africa, to parts of Latin America and the Pacific Rim. With the Bandung Conference and the
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formation of the Non-Aligned Movement, many of Europe's former colonies banded together

to form a common bloc, aligned with neither the advanced capitalist First World nor with

the socialist Second World. In this historical context, the category of Third World

literature emerged; a category that has itself spawned a whole industry of scholarly and

critical studies, particularly in the metropolitan West, but increasingly in the homelands of

the Third World itself.

Setting himself against the growing tendency to homogenize Third World literature

and cultures, Aijaz Ahmad has produced a spirited critique of the major theoretical statements

on colonial discourse and post-colonialism, dismantling many of the commonplaces and

conceits that dominate contemporary cultural criticism. With lengthy considerations of,

among others, Fredric Jameson, Edward Said, and the Subaltern Studies group, In

Theory also contains brilliant analyses of the concept of Indian literature, of the genealogy of

the term Third World, and of the conditions under which so-called colonial discourse

theory emerged in metropolitan intellectual circles. Erudite and lucid, Ahmad's remapping

of the terrain of cultural theory is certain to provoke passionate response.

Aijaz Ahmad's spirited and faintly reproachful rejoinder to Fredric Jameson's "Third

World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capital" in the pages of Social Text has become

an important document in the canon of cultural theory. Their exchange raised fundamental

questions regarding the production and distribution of "Third World" texts, and Ahmad's

incisive analysis of the category of "Third World" literature displayed the impossibility of

creating such categories. Ahmad's compelling insights and his wide knowledge of various

literatures were evident in that article and is again a feature in his latest publication, In

Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. What is, however, most striking in this work is

Ahmad's efforts to locate literary theory as it has developed in the Anglo-American academy

over the last twenty-five years within the framework of what he considers "the fundamental
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dialecticbetween imperialism, decolonization, and the struggles for socialismwhich

constitutes the contradictory nature of the world in our epoch" (9).

Ahmad's unquestioning acceptance of this "fundamental dialectic" provides him with

a very definite political and philosophical space from which he builds a provocative argument

concerning the deradicalization of the American academy. His criticism is always

accompanied by a detailed presentation and elaboration of the significant historical events of

the time. Indeed, as he points out, "the problem of the determinate set of mediations which

connect the cultural productions of a period with other kinds of productions and political

processes . . . is rarely addressed with any degree of rigour in precisely those branches of

literary theory where issues of colony and empire are most lengthily addressed" (5). Ahmad's

goal, clearly, is to rejuvenate a Marxist tradition which has, according to him, become

completely subordinate to other theoretical positions. In Theory, then, is a careful Marxist

rereading of "a particular political configuration of authors and positions which has surfaced

in particular branches of literary theory, clustered around questions of empire, colony,

migrancy, post-coloniality, and so on, as these questions have been posed from the 1960s

onwards" (3).

The book includes eight essays covering these authors and positions and a lengthy

introduction in which Ahmad manages to explain the turn toward poststructuralism in the

American academy against the backdrop of "essential global realities" (17). His historical

analysis of the emergence and subsequent success of poststructuralism is a compelling one,

and his ability to arrange and distinguish significant parallels between literary movements

and global/national politico-cultural shifts are almost always convincing. Ahmad's historical

sweep embraces the political changes and calamities in the last twenty-five years, but in the

end he moves too rapidly back and forth between political events, literary figures, and literary
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critics, trying at the same time to elucidate these complex configurations within the

framework of a defining paradigm. Ahmad had been exactly right in pointing out that

Jameson's proclamations on "all" Third World literature had been made precisely because

Jameson needed such a closed category to "produce a theory of Third World Literature"

(107). Ahmad, however, does not hesitate occasionally to construct similarly dubious

categories in order to produce unproblematized theories of nation, decolonization,

immigration, or postcoloniality.

Ahmad's generalizations are perhaps most evident in his discussions on "languages of

class, ideologies of immigration." In this chapter, Ahmad argues that "the combination of

class origin, professional ambition and lack of a prior grounding in a stable socialist praxis

predisposes a great many of the radicalized immigrants located in the metropolitan university

towards . . . an opportunistic kind of Third-Worldism as the appropriate form of oppositional

politics" (86). While Ahmad's point is definitely valid, it is simplistic to assume that any

cultural space, whether it be in the so-called first or third world, is without its contradictions.

The always ambivalent status of the bourgeois academic who occupies hybrid spaces is

inevitably complicit with systems of knowledge.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. In Theory: classes, nations, literatures by Aijaz ahmad

2. Aijaz Ahmad Wikipedia

3. World peoples Blog; Blog Archive, Aijaz Ahmad

4. In Theory: classes, nations, literatures, Google books. Com

5. In Theory, Versobooks.com