Diasporic upper-class academics adopted identity-oppression narratives that delegitimized class analysis

Evidence

Those who came as graduate students and then joined the faculties, especially in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, tended to come from upper classes in their home countries. In the process of relocating themselves in rhe metropolitan countries, they needed documents of their assertion, proof that they had always been oppressed. Books that connected oppression with class were nor very useful, because they neither came from the working class nor were intending to join that class in their new country. Those who said that majority of rhe populations in Africa and Asia certainly suffered from colonialism, bur that there were also those who benefited from it, were useless, because many of the new professionals who were part of rhis immigration themselves came from those other families, those other classes, which had been rhe beneficiaries; Said would pose this question of the beneficiaries of colonialism in very peculiar ways in his invocation of Ranajit Guha, as we shall soon see. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 820

Categorization

• XREF: Materialist counterpoint to the strategic essentialism research: Ahmad grounds the uptake of identity-essentialist theory in class interest of the immigrant intellectual — exactly the material-evasion critique the reader seeks. — connects to: Race and ethnicity scholarship has displaced class as a central academic preoccupation; Identity-oppression theory was adopted instrumentally for professional advancement by immigrant male academics — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 821; Race and ethnicity displaced class as the central focus of scholarly debate (+5 more)
• SEED: Potential essay: ‘the migration of privilege’ — how relocation to metropolitan academia converted home-country class privilege into oppositional identity capital.

Broader Connections

• Identity-oppression theory was adopted instrumentally for professional advancement by immigrant male academics #expands (0.90) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 821
• Race and ethnicity scholarship has displaced class as a central academic preoccupation #corroborates (0.85)
• Race and ethnicity displaced class as the central focus of scholarly debate #corroborates (0.85)
• Post-cold-war racism defeated Marxian class-based explanations #corroborates (0.80)
• Intersectionality theory drove the expansion of identity-based vocabulary. #expands (0.78) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 462
• Marxist class categories froze into a fixed historical image of class #qualifies (0.75)