Colonial intelligentsias are structurally compelled toward the colonizer’s language in public life
Evidence
The emphasis here is on functions, and on the determination of these by the social division of labour. By the term ‘intelligentsia’ here I do not simply mean ‘writers’, less still ‘litrerateurs’ The term includes, rather, all those whose function in the social division of labour is (a) to produce ideas and (b) to lead the institutions of state and society on the basis of claims of knowledge. In a colonial society, state-associated strata occupy key positions in this social category, and the upper layers of such strata function under a professional compulsion to use mainly the language of the colonizing country in the public sphere; in private life, and in activities associated with leisure time, they may continue ro use their own language(s). For these upper layers, then, the linguistic differentiation between public and private spheres, with the concomitant tendency of the public sphere determining in the long run the social mores of the private sphere, is a structural feature of this colonial matrix, individual exceptions notwithstanding.
— Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 1534
Categorization
DEFINE: Ahmad’s materialist definition of ‘intelligentsia’ by social function rather than by creative writing - a class-based analytic counterweight to discourse-readings of colonial identity.
XREF: Connects to Foucault’s account of colonial discourse and to Ahmad’s materialist critique of discourse-determinism central to the reader’s project. — connects to: The colonial intelligentsia were themselves partly constituted by the languages of their rulers — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 865; Bilingualism gave colonial intelligentsias access to modular models of nationalism — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 452; Colonial administrative language can become the lingua franca of anticolonial nationalism — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 667 (+4 more)