Class-based analysis was jettisoned because professionals wanted oppression narratives that served their own interests.
Evidence
Among critiques that needed to be jettisoned, or at least greatly modified, were the Marxist ones, because Marxists had this habit of speaking about classes, even in Asia and Africa. What the upwardly mobile professionals in this new immigration needed were narratives of oppression that would get them preferential treatment, reserved jobs, higher salaries in the social position they already occupied: namely, as middle-class professionals, mostly male. For such purposes Orientalism was the perfect narrative. When, only slightly later, enough women found themselves in rhar same position, the category of the ‘Third World female subaltern’ was found highly serviceable. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 821
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: Ahmad’s core materialist indictment: the turn to Orientalism and subaltern categories is itself class-positioned — discourse-first theory serves upwardly mobile middle-class professionals, not the oppressed they claim to speak for. This is the sharpest version of the material-evasion critique the reader is tracing.
- XREF: Directly targets Spivak’s ‘Third World female subaltern’ and the reception of Said’s Orientalism — the reader’s own strategic-essentialism research thread. — connects to: Diasporic upper-class academics adopted identity-oppression narratives that delegitimized class analysis — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 820; Bourgeois ideology fragments classes into possessive individual subjects. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 912
- SEED: Essay angle: ‘Who needed Orientalism?’ — reading the adoption of postcolonial discourse theory as a class project of the immigrant professional-managerial class.
Broader Connections
- Diasporic upper-class academics adopted identity-oppression narratives that delegitimized class analysis
#corroborates(0.92) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 820 - Bourgeois ideology fragments classes into possessive individual subjects.
#exemplifies(0.75) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 912