Cosmopolitan identity-freedom in criticism can collide with what late-capitalist universal markets themselves offer

Evidence

The reader and writer of literature no longer needs to tie him or herself to an image of the poet or scholar in isolation, secure, stable, national in identity, class, gender, or profession, but can think and experience with Genet in Palestine or Algeria, with Tayeb Salih as a black man in London, with Jamaica Kincaid in the white world, with Rushdie in India and Britain, and so on. To paraphrase from a remark made by Auerbach in one of his last essays, our philological home is the world, and not the nation or even the individual writer. … All that seems to have changed since Auerbach made that recommendation, in the name of philology, is that London itself- Britain, the white worldhas become an object among other objects of consumption, qutte on a par with India. This is the imperial geography not of the colonial period but of late capitalism: commodity acquires universality, and a universal market arises across national frontiers and local customs, while white trade rejoins black trade. When cultural criticism reaches this point of convergence with the universal market, one might add, it becomes indistinguishable from commodity fetishism. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 917

Categorization

• XREF: This passage, let alone the two paragraphs as stitched, speaks to the reader’s whole project about strategic co-existence with what is criticized - it reads like an inverse mirror of how the reader worries about whether strategic essentialism can be kept at a distance without collapsing into full essentialism. — connects to: A marketable marginalized identity lets third-world writers critique the West acceptably — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 455; Neoliberalism survived by co-opting multiculturalism into marketable identity commodities — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 185; Individual liberty has become a cosmopolitan value beyond its Western origins (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• A marketable marginalized identity lets third-world writers critique the West acceptably #qualifies (0.82) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 455
• Neoliberalism survived by co-opting multiculturalism into marketable identity commodities #expands (0.80) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 185
• Neoliberal markets pre-optimize and monetize protest identities for profit #exemplifies (0.78) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 912
• Individual liberty has become a cosmopolitan value beyond its Western origins #qualifies (0.75)