Anti-Marx poststructuralist critique ignores how Indian historians read Marx
Evidence
There has been, since The Order of Things, a pose of weariness and wry contempt. This is duplicated, then, in the whole range of Anglo-American literary poststructuralisms – and not only literary, nor only poststructuralisms – where one routinely encounters a dense system of mutual citations and invocations of Foucault and/or Said which portrays Marx as an Orientalistic enthusiast of colonialism, based almost always on that same passage which Said quotes. … A striking feature of this portrayal of Marx as an Orientalist, based as it is on some journalistic observations about India, is that it never even refers to how those same observations may have been seen by India’s own anti-imperialist historians. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 26
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to Ahmad’s broader work in this book on Third-World Marxism vs. poststructuralism, and to the pattern of polemical dismissals versus detailed engagement. — connects to: Anti-imperialist historians of India contradict the portrayal of Marx as an Orientalist
- QUESTION: Worth chasing: what did India’s own anti-imperialist historians actually write about Marx’s journalism on India? Ahmad gestures at it but doesn’t deliver here.
Related
- Anti-imperialist historians of India contradict the portrayal of Marx as an Orientalist (similarity 0.93)
- Anti-colonial critique before Said was overwhelmingly Marxist-affiliated (similarity 0.81)
- Marx’s Indian writings were conjectural, not theoretical (similarity 0.81)
- Marx’s dispatches on India require contextual scholarship, not summary dismissal (similarity 0.80)
- Marx’s colonial writings were conjectural speculation, not worked-out theory (similarity 0.79)