Culturalist postcolonial labeling is arrant idealism that levels history
Evidence
To describe, on the other hand, a critic as ‘postcolonial’ simply because he/she came of age after decolonizarion is a tautology; to ascribe a shared cultural attitude towards Western dominance to all intellectuals who begin writing after decolonization, and a structurally different attitude to all those whose intellectual formation was completed under colonial rule, regardless of their individual social and political locations, is the most arrant idealism and facilitates a very peculiar kind of ahistorical levelling. I might add that this way of deploying the terms ‘colonial’ and ‘post-colonial’ for self-projection, and for defining locations within the profession of cultural criticism, is now quire widespread among literary theorists. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 857
Categorization
- XREF: Core to the reader’s goal: Ahmad’s charge that discourse-first postcolonialism substitutes generational-identity labels for structural analysis — the same move strategic essentialism risks. — connects to: Idealizing a past by stripping its material basis persists as cultural nationalism — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 472; Cultural theory requires a materialist theory of imperial history — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 156; Postcolonial psychoanalytic theory builds ideal types detached from empirical reality of racism (+1 more)
- SEED: Article hook: how ‘postcolonial’ and ‘strategic essentialism’ operate as self-projection career location-markers inside the cultural criticism profession rather than analytic categories.
Broader Connections
- Cultural theory requires a materialist theory of imperial history
#corroborates(0.85) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 156 - Idealizing a past by stripping its material basis persists as cultural nationalism
#corroborates(0.78) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 472 - Postcolonial psychoanalytic theory builds ideal types detached from empirical reality of racism
#exemplifies(0.75) - Cultural nationalism is constitutive of postcolonial theory’s theoretical stances.
#corroborates(0.72) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 263