No properly Marxist literary culture has been built in the USA despite postwar gains.

Evidence

I have presented a very complex history in such telegraphic terms with three purposes in mind. First, I want to emphasize the sheer weight of reactionary positions in the Anglo-American literary formations. Second, I do want ro stress the gains which have been made there since the 1960s, despite the havoc caused recently by the more mindless kinds of postsrructuralism; for the first time in its history the metropolitan university is being forced, in some of its nooks and niches, ro face issues of race and gender and empire in a way it has never done before. One simply has to compare the nature and breadth of today’s debates on these issues with the absence of such debates in the 1950s, and even the 1930s, to grasp the degree of change. But, third, I also want to stress that the political vagrancy of much of the radical literary intelligentsia in the USA is such that it has been difficult - so far impossible, in fact - to constitute a properly Marxist political or literary culture, on any appreciable scale. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 264

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s research: Ahmad’s framing of discourse-first/poststructuralist critique as materially evasive maps onto the strategic essentialism problem — the metropolitan university absorbs race/gender/empire debate while Marxist political culture stays impossible.