Students’ resistance to metropolitan racism produced a defensive ideology of parochial cultural pride.

Evidence

This tendency was greatly augmented by the radical sectors of the Afro- American intelligentsia which identified deeply with the emergent groups in newly independent African countries, and by the students from Asia, Africa and the Caribbean who faced various kinds of racism in the Anglo- American academy and resisted that pressure by positing against it the literary documents and cultural practices of the social configurations that were dominant in their own societies but commanded no status in the Western canonical formations. This was a defensive ideology of parochial pride necessitated by the superior power of the metropolitanpredominantly whiteacademy, with the student coming to represent, in his own eyes as much as in his hosts’, the culture of his nation and his newly independent state. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 178

Categorization

• XREF: Speaks to the reader’s question about WHAT actually generates the nationalist essentialism: material pressure (racism in the academy) rather than mere theoretical error — relevant to whether strategic essentialism can be held collectively. — connects to: Racist ideologies can be turned into vehicles of opposition and resistance — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 638; Ideological signs carry opposing class accents and become sites of struggle; Resistance to oppression also creates social categories of difference (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Racist ideologies can be turned into vehicles of opposition and resistance #expands (0.85) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 638
• Resistance to oppression also creates social categories of difference #expands (0.85)
• Ideological signs carry opposing class accents and become sites of struggle #expands (0.80)
• The colonized turn a passive cultural element into a taboo weapon of resistance #corroborates (0.75) — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 165