Reading Rushdie through ‘Nation’ and ‘Third World’ frames obscures his class moorings

Evidence

The necessary, though often unintended, consequence of these approachesthe preoccupation with Rushdie’s portrayal of ‘the Nation’ and ‘the Third World’ on the one hand; with the digressive self-reflexivity (‘lndianness’?) of his narrative technique on the other - has been the obscuring of his ideological moorings in the High Culture of the modern metropolitan bourgeoisie as well as the suppression of a whole range of questions which have little to do with either ‘the Nation’ or ‘the Third World’, but which I rake to be quite central to the basic import of his The more fundamental questions will become clearer as we come to the reading of the novel, but two features of the ideological subtext itself may be mentioned here in passing, so as to illustrate the general ambience of the work. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 492

Categorization

• XREF: This is the core Ahmad move — discourse-first frames (here ‘Third World’/‘Nation’ readings) obscure material class structures — resonant throughout the reader’s research on strategic essentialism and postcolonial discourse-determinism. — connects to: Rushdie’s class-bounded experience and modernist affiliation form a closed circle excluding heroic action. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 548

Broader Connections

• Rushdie’s class-bounded experience and modernist affiliation form a closed circle excluding heroic action. #expands (0.80) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 548