Post-structuralist critics marginalize Marxist empire scholarship through jargon rather than argument

Evidence

Until about the mid 1970s, most of that scholarship had been produced by people who were either Marxists themselves or were quite prepared to accept their affinities with Marxist positions on issues of colony and empire; much useful work of that kind continues to be done even today. Within mainstream scholarship, the usual way of marginalizing that work was either to ignore it altogether or to declare it simple-minded and propagandistic. Dismissal by the post-structuralist critic is as a rule equally strident, though the vocabulary has of course changed. Instead of using words like ‘simple-minded’ or ‘propagandist’, one now declares that work of that kind was too positivistic, too deeply contaminated with empiricism, historicism, the problematics of realism and representability, the metaphysical belief in origin, agency, truth. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 429

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the same criticism of post-structuralist rhetoric Ahmad develops against Said here and throughout the book.

Related

• Postcolonial theory lacks a systematic periodization of its own practices. (similarity 0.80)
• Detaching Marxist concepts from their political praxis distorts them into decorative analytics. (similarity 0.79)
• Said’s career bridged liberal academia and avant-garde theory on an anti-Marxist basis (similarity 0.79)
• Poststructuralism’s rise in colonial literary theory conceals rather than explains its material-economic context (similarity 0.78)
• Rejecting Marxism reframed colonial conflict as nations and culture, not classes and capital (similarity 0.78)
• Cultural theory requires a materialist theory of imperial history (similarity 0.78)
• Rejecting Marxism foreclosed self-critique, so poststructuralism replaced rather than corrected nationalism (similarity 0.78)