Metropolitan theory idealized the singularized Third World as the site of cultural opposition

Evidence

It was against this background that the specifically Chinese version of the Three Worlds Theory gained its widest global currency, and nationalismand, for cultural theorists, the ideology of cultural nationalism - was designated as the determinate answer to imperialist (postmodernist?) culture. In those Asian countries where Maoism gave rise to substantial communist movements, there was at least an emphasis on the culture of the peasantry against that of the dominant classes; in the metropolitan versions, the whole of the ‘Third World’, with all its classes singularized into an oppositionality, was idealized as the site, simultaneously, of By the 1980s, this global configuration was undergoing a historic seachange. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 148

Categorization

• XREF: Directly supports the reader’s project: this is Ahmad’s critique of how metropolitan cultural nationalism (a form of essentialism) singularizes the Third World across classes — the material-evasion move being traced from Spivak’s strategic essentialism through Ahmad’s class-based counter. — connects to: Metropolitan theory inflates single genres into universal forms for the Third World — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 110; Structural linguistic asymmetry makes the third-world text unknowable to metropolitan theorists — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 376; Third-Worldist cultural theory structurally suppresses class and gender analysis — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 363 (+2 more)
• ADDENDUM: Relevant to the reader’s earlier claim about Indian elites collaborating in their own colonization — metropolitan Left idealization of Third World culture parallels Egyptian elites’ self-colonial framing in masking internal class structures.

Broader Connections

• Metropolitan theory inflates single genres into universal forms for the Third World #expands (0.90) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 110
• Structural linguistic asymmetry makes the third-world text unknowable to metropolitan theorists #expands (0.85) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 376
• Third-Worldist cultural theory structurally suppresses class and gender analysis #complicates (0.85) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 363
• Third World literary theory effaces Marxism-rooted radical cultural heritage #complicates (0.80) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 190