Poststructuralist debunking of nationalism succeeded Third-Worldist nationalism as the dominant academic counter-canon

Evidence

I have also argued, in several places in this book, that the development of those counter-canonical trends has undergone two distinct phases - the first dominated by certain varieties of Third-Worldist nationalism; the latter, more recent, marked much more decisively by a poststructuralist debunking of all nations and nationalisms as mere myths of origin and as essentialist, coercive totalizations. If Jameson’s textwhich I examine in Chapter 3- was a late and authoritative statement of that earlier position, Rushdie’s novelistic enterprise greatly facilitates the consolidation of the latter tendency. The enterprise itself was so widely admired, in turn, partly because of this particular convergence between the novelist and his avantgarde critics. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 61

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to Spivak’s ‘strategic essentialism’ and to the reader’s research on whether poststructuralist anti-essentialism obscures material/class structure — Ahmad frames this as the consolidation of a materially evasive tendency. — connects to: Poststructuralist Third World theory arose as a substitute for failed nationalist ideology — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 274; Poststructuralist critique rejects nationalism wholesale instead of judging its specific historical forms — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 169; Rejecting Marxism foreclosed self-critique, so poststructuralism replaced rather than corrected nationalism — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 70 (+3 more)
• SEED: Possible essay angle: how aesthetic celebration (of Rushdie) rode the ideological convergence with poststructuralist anti-nationalism rather than the work’s own oppositional merits.
• QUESTION: Worth tracing whether Ahmad sees the two-phase shift as mapping onto the later local→global collapse of Third-Worldist essentialism.

Broader Connections

• Poststructuralist Third World theory arose as a substitute for failed nationalist ideology #expands (0.92) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 274
• A new post-1970s left intellectual combined Third World rhetoric with anticommunism and Nietzschean post-structuralism #expands (0.90) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 791
• Rejecting Marxism foreclosed self-critique, so poststructuralism replaced rather than corrected nationalism #expands (0.88) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 70
• A new Left intellectual type combined Third World rhetoric with anti-communism #expands (0.88) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 356
• Poststructuralist critique rejects nationalism wholesale instead of judging its specific historical forms #expands (0.82) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 169