The radical literary-theory current was absorbed into poststructuralism and de-radicalized

Evidence

Politically more engaged in its earlier projects, increasingly more professionalized and confined to the academy since the recooling of America began in the latter 1970s, this minoritarian current of radicals in contemporary literary theory has its origins in those new groupings among students and teachers of the 1960s which had at that time begun to interrogate the very ‘literariness’ of the literary text, so as to locate it not in the history of genres and styles but in the larger history of the world itself. When Marxism had proposed such a worldly approach to literature, a confident American literary Establishment had dismissed it out of hand, as mere ‘sociology’ Now, under mounting pressures, a whole range of people -only a few of them Marxist in any fashion or degreehave had to open up this buried continent of Literature to the scrutinizing gaze of history and politics. How this has come about is a complex tale, an.d this is not the occasion to tell it, but it is worth emphasizing that the emergence of this currentcomplex as it was, fragmented as it remained, and regardless of all its later detours and largely successful incorporation into poststructuralism - was connected, in its origins, with the crisis provoked in the Western academy first by the Algerian Revolution and then by the Vietnam War. It was in the crucible of those wars that at least some of the intellectuals of the contemporary West learned to question their own place in the world, and hence also to question the hegemonic closure of the texts upon which their epistemologies were based. One of the side-effects of that overall crisis was that Literature was pressed to disclose the strategic complicities whereby it had traditionally represented racesand gendersand empires. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 243

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s materialist framing: Ahmad locates the origin of discourse-determinism’s political energy in 1960s anti-war decolonization struggles, then its ‘recooling’ post-1970s — the professionalization argument that pairs with the strategic essentialism critique. — connects to: American deconstruction stripped political radicalism from French theory into a hermetic textual technology. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 229; Poststructuralism’s rise in colonial literary theory conceals rather than explains its material-economic context — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 163; Renegade radical thinkers from the tradition sought to recuperate radical theory from Marxism’s blunders (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Third World literary theory effaces Marxism-rooted radical cultural heritage #expands (0.82) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 190
• Renegade radical thinkers from the tradition sought to recuperate radical theory from Marxism’s blunders #qualifies (0.80)
• Poststructuralism’s rise in colonial literary theory conceals rather than explains its material-economic context #expands (0.78) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 163