Theorists who became academics were only marginally involved in real political struggle

Evidence

Those younger literary theorists in Britain and North America who had come out of the student movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and started their academic careers more or less after the cooling of America began with Nixon’s second Presidential term and as Britain started skidding from the Wilsonian variants oflabourism to outright Thatcherite reaction, found their radicalism caught in a series of contradictions. The international situation which had framed much of their radicalism had been intensely revolutionary: the Vietnam War, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the wars of liberation in the Portuguese colonies, the immensely powerful figures of Fidel and Che Guevara, the victory of U nidad Popular in Chile, the student uprisings from Mexico City to Paris to Lahore. Their academic training, meanwhile, had been an affair mainly of choosing between ‘New Criticism’ on the one hand, Frye and Bloom and Paul.de Man on the other. … Those who became theorists had been, as a rule, only marginally involved in the political movement. Most of them had known the ‘movement’ mostly in its other kinds of social emphases: certainly the music, the alternative readings of Laing and Marcuse, surely the occasional demonstration - but there had been, through it all, the pressure to write brilliant term papers and equally brilliant dissertations. It was, in other words, mostly the survivorJ of the ‘movement’ who later became so successful in the profession. Radicalism had been, for most of them, a state of mind, brought about by an intellectual identification with the revolutionary wave that had gripped so much of the world when they were truly young; of the day-to-day drudgeries of, say, a political party or a trade union they had been (and were to remain) largely innocent. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 269

Categorization

• XREF: Directly supports the reader’s research question by suggesting that discourse-first theory (strategic essentialism’s milieu) was itself a product of theorists detached from material class struggle. — connects to: Theorists who later dominated academia came from the movement’s margins, not its activists. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 269; Academic theory domesticated 1960s political dissent into textual culture — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 23; Intellectual work differs from academic work and from politics itself
• SEED: Article angle: the class position of the critic — who gets to hold identity playfully/strategically versus who is bound by material necessity.

Broader Connections

• Theorists who later dominated academia came from the movement’s margins, not its activists. #corroborates (1.00) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 269
• Academic theory domesticated 1960s political dissent into textual culture #expands (0.75) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 23
• Intellectual work differs from academic work and from politics itself #expands (0.72)