Postcolonial literary theory’s rapid shift from nationalism to poststructuralism concealed material world dynamics

Evidence

My starring point in the present book, briefly put, is that the sizeable changes we have witnessed in the situation(s) of literary theory over the past quarter-century have occurred within the context of monumental and extremely rapid shifts in the economic and political orderings of the world, and that the surrender, in rapid succession, first to a Third-Worldist kind of nationalism and then to deconstructionto poststructuralism generally, in facton the part of that branch of literary theory which is most engaged with questions of colony and empire conceals, instead of explaining, the relationships between literature, literary theory and that world of which these purport to be the literature and the theory. By the same token, then, the vicissitudes and even re-enactments of those more global realities in the shifting frames of literary theory become intelligible only if we connect the theory with the determinate and shaping forces of our time, not through poststructuralism but by examining, as a considerable issue in itself, the historical co-ordinates of the rise and fall of cultural nationalism as the master-code of this theory in its earlier phase, and then the turn away from activist kinds of politics - even nationalist politics - as this theory fully develops irs poststructuralist complicities. … We know that this branch of literary theory privileged cultural nationalism as the determinate ideological form of resistance against the dominant imperialist culture throughout the 1970s; but then, increasingly in the 1980s, nationalism itself, in all its forms, came to be discarded as an oppressive, coercive mechanism. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 163

Categorization

• XREF: Directly extends Ahmad’s materialist critique of discourse-determinism against the strategic-essentialism research thread — this is the theoretical move that frames how identity-based (nationalist then poststructuralist-discourse) frames evaded class/material analysis. — connects to: Literary theory’s rejection of nationalism mirrors poststructuralism’s rise — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 62; Postcolonial literary theory obscures the political and economic materialities determining it — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 43; Postcolonial theory recasts decolonization as a literary-critical rather than political contest — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 393 (+8 more)
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: whether the 1970s-1980s documented shift away from cultural nationalism maps onto a parallel timeline for Spivak’s strategic essentialism coining (1984) and later retraction — does the poststructuralist turn Ahmad dates also defang essentialism’s strategic use?
• SEED: Angle for an essay: the historicity of ‘strategic essentialism’ — showing how Spivak’s term aged within, and was shaped by, precisely the nationalist-to-poststructuralist sea-change Ahmad periodizes here.

Broader Connections

• Postcolonial literary theory obscures the political and economic materialities determining it #qualifies (0.95) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 43
• Literary theory’s rejection of nationalism mirrors poststructuralism’s rise #corroborates (0.90) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 62
• Poststructuralist Third World theory arose as a substitute for failed nationalist ideology #corroborates (0.85) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 274
• Postcolonial theory recasts decolonization as a literary-critical rather than political contest #expands (0.80) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 393
• Idealizing a past by stripping its material basis persists as cultural nationalism #expands (0.75) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 472
• Colonial and post-colonial categories mask divergent intellectual trajectories spanning both eras #qualifies (0.75) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 385