This publication of "In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures" is a reprint from Aijaz Ahmad's essential 1992 critique on postcolonial thought and the associated 'Third Worldism' of the First World intellectuals. Writing from a consistent and sensible Marxist perspective, Ahmad, a Pakistani working in India, criticizes the one-sidedness and posturing prevalent in so much hip academic postcolonial theory. Although the book itself is not entirely free of the terrible use of language that is the hallmark of this theoretical approach, with the occasional "discourse", "mapping" and "interrogating" making their appearance, Ahmad succeeds very well at dissecting the errors and bad faith that are at the core of the postcolonial enterprise in Western academia.
The first of these errors is the idealism of postcolonial theory. That is, postcolonial theorists are uninterested in economics, in politics, even in such simple things as facts and causes; all these are mere 'narratives', and any attempt at systematically analyzing those or bringing them into an analysis of literature is to be derided as 'totalizing narratives', the gravest crime in this branch of academia. As a result, each text and each author is a disembodied whole. No understanding of nation or class exists, because all analyses are just narratives, and as a result all theory is reduced to stories about stories, with no end and no beginning, and no grounding in any reality. At the same time, Ahmad notes that they tend to support the concept of 'Third World literature' or 'Subaltern studies', implying that there is a unity in the developing world that makes any text from there, or in some arbitrary manner associated with it, subversive and superior for that reason alone. This completely ignores the great differentiation in class, culture, politics and religion that exists within and between the various developing natures. It also utterly fails to properly analyze the position of given 'Third World writers' within this - Ahmad points to the case of Rabindranath Tagore, who is considered a canonical 'Subaltern' writer, despite the fact that within the context of Indian literature his works are considered conservative and elite. As Aijaz Ahmad notes, it is no coincidence that much of this postcolonial paradigm has been and is being produced by academics who are emigrants from developing nations within the developed world, and as relatively upper class people from poor countries benefit the most from a mode of analysis that contrasts only the West and the rest (in favor of the latter), while ignoring or denying any internal differentiations.
Much of the book is taken up by a systematic study of the works of Fredric Jameson, Edward Said and Salman Rushdie in this context. Rushdie gets a short treatment, where Ahmad relativizes his importance in literature and somewhat gratuitously accuses him of poorly portraying women. Jameson he criticizes for using the concept of the three worlds in such a manner that he conceives of the First as capitalist, the Second as socialist, and the Third as fundamentally neither. Ahmad correctly objects that the Third is just as capitalist as the rest, but simply suffers a more backwards capitalism, and that therefore to read one 'Third World literature' of nationalism into the varied texts from these nations is to fundamentally misunderstand their political economic position. It is however somewhat confusing that Ahmad himself takes 'Three Worlds Theory' the preposterous idea of late Maoism that the 'Second world' was imperialist like the First and therefore didn't really count; only at the end of the book does he differentiate this from the common use of the worlds for the different development positions relatively, which is the sense I use it. In that context the somewhat dated nature of the book can be noted, since the 'Second World' has entirely lost its reality in the sense Ahmad uses it. Moreover, 'Third Worldism' in the sense of anti-imperialism is a real politics and has a distinct relation to a materialist and empirical approach of the kind he favors. Ahmad does go into it somewhat, but since the focus is on literature only, there is not much room to go into this use of the term.
Along the same lines, the book also contains a discussion of Marx' articles on India, where Ahmad defends Marx from an all too easy reading of his works as Orientalist in the sense of Edward Said, whose many inconsistencies and contradictions with regard to his own position on the 'Third World' he deftly exposes. Finally, there is a chapter that goes into his proposal for a program to study (more) systematically the comparative literature of India with an eye to the idea of an 'Indian literature'. This essay is interesting and fits the theme of the book, but very much written for insiders - much of it will be difficult to follow if you are not quite familiar with Indian literature and Indian history already.
It is a pity that Ahmad does not go into major postcolonial academic authors in more depth - it would have been highly useful if he could have thoroughly criticized the likes of Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak and other charlatans from the perspective of a materialism that understands the way in which all text is embedded in a real social context from which it cannot be dislodged. Similarly, one would wish he had gone more into the issue of why postcolonial theory and its relatives, postmodernism and poststructuralism, are characterized by such awful writing, unnecessary overabstraction and deliberately nebulous use of terms. There is much to be said about the way in which this constitutes a conscious retreat of academic domains that used to be critical, under pressure from liberal resurgence on the one hand and loss of faith in the power of facts to confirm and defend the leftist worldview on the other hand. But again, this book was published in 1992 and much of this is a development that reached its apogee after it. It is precisely the force of Ahmad's critique and the fresh air he lets into the stale basement of postcolonialism that make one want to read more.
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