Cultural theory requires a materialist theory of imperial history

Evidence

It is not possible to pose questions about colony and empire, and about their representations in cultural products, without possessing a theory of such facts. … Marxism provides a particular constellation of concepts to account for facts of this order. … The objective, in other words, is to make explicit the premisses from which I offer my own readings of literary theory, as well as to prepare the theoretical ground from which it is then possible to argue that both Third- Worldist cultural nationalism and the more recently fashionable postmodernisms offer false know ledges of real facts. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 156

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly evidences the reader’s core project: Ahmad’s insistence that discourse-first ‘strategic essentialist’ moves (Third-Worldist nationalism, postmodernism) count as ‘false knowledges of real facts’ precisely because both evacuate material history — supporting a materialist critique of strategic essentialism.
• XREF: Connects to the Foucault ‘race-struggle’ counter-history motif in Society Must Be Defended and to Spivak’s strategic essentialism critique — Ahmad slots both Third-Worldist essentialism and anti-essentialist postmodernism as twin failures to theorize materialities. — connects to: Postcolonial literary theory obscures the political and economic materialities determining it — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 43; Culturalist postcolonial labeling is arrant idealism that levels history — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 857