The Rushdie affair exposed metropolitan Left cultural nationalism as selective about its martyrs

Evidence

It took ~ principally literary event - the macabre sentencing of Salman Rushdie for selling certain novelizations of Islam to British and American corporate publishing - for protest campaigns against Khomeini to envelop that very literary intelligentsia which had never bothered when that same clerical state had not only sentenced but tortured and actually killed countless communists and other patriots. When the degeneration of the Iranian state into clerical fascism became unmistakable, the last remaining illusion of Third-Worldist cultural nationalism finally had to be abandoned. What, then, ro replace it with? Socialism had already been renounced as the determinate name of imperialism’s negation. Nationalismthe whole of italso now went. This is the redoubled vacuum which, in the radicalized versions of metropolitan literary theory, posrstructuralism is now .to fill. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 150

Categorization

• SEED: An angle: Western literary-intellectual sympathy for Islamist ‘resistance’ tracks which victims are legible — writers facing fatwas versus communists facing torture — as a diagnostic of discourse-first politics.
• XREF: Sharpens the reader’s critique thread: Ahmad reads post-structuralist essentialism as filling the vacuum left after nationalism’s collapse, directly parallel to Spivak’s strategic essentialism occupying the same emptied space. — connects to: The metropolitan Left erased Israel’s settler-colonial origins from its discourse — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 146; Leftist critics reject rooted ethnic identities as essentialist overstatements; Said’s Rushdie defense contradicted his own critique of representation — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 410 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Said’s Rushdie defense contradicted his own critique of representation #exemplifies (0.82) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 410
• The metropolitan Left erased Israel’s settler-colonial origins from its discourse #exemplifies (0.78) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 146
• Western literary leftists defended Iran only after the Rushdie fatwa #corroborates (0.75) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 58
• Leftist critics reject rooted ethnic identities as essentialist overstatements #complicates (0.72)