Postcolonial academia’s class base explains its rejection of class analysis.

Evidence

1960s onwards, with substantial numbers of Asian immigrants being based now among the perry-bourgeois and techno-managerial strata. 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

• SHARE: A psychologist or sociologist of knowledge studying how scholars’ class origins shape their theories would value this precise mechanism.
• XREF: Supplies the materialist explanation the reader seeks: why collective strategic-essentialist claims (always-oppressed identity) flourish precisely among beneficiaries — the material structures behind the identity performance. — connects to: Diasporic upper-class academics adopted identity-oppression narratives that delegitimized class analysis — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 820; Third-Worldist cultural theory structurally suppresses class and gender analysis — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 363; Freirean pedagogy expanded from class-only to intersectional inclusion of diverse identities. — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed:…, 52

Broader Connections

• Diasporic upper-class academics adopted identity-oppression narratives that delegitimized class analysis #exemplifies (0.90) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 820
• Third-Worldist cultural theory structurally suppresses class and gender analysis #expands (0.80) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 363