Third-Worldist cultural theory structurally suppresses class and gender analysis

Evidence

Even in cultural theory as it has developed in the metropolitan countries, an exclusive emphasis on the nation, and on nationalism as the necessary ideology emanating from the national situation, has been a logical feature of Third-Worldist perspectives. For once the :world is divided into three large unities, each fundamentally coherent and fundamentally external to one another, it is extremely difficult to speak of any fundamental differences within particular national structuresdifferences, let us say, of class or of gender formation. One is then forced, by the terms of one’s own discourse, to minimize those kinds of differences, and to absolutize, on the other hand, the difference between, say, the First and the Third Worlds. The preferred technique among cultural theorists, then, is to look at ‘Third World’ literary texts in terms always of their determination by the colonial encounter, but rarely in terms of their determination by class and gender formations, or from the standpoint of what the needs of a socialist cultural production, quite beyond the issue of colonial determination, might be. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 363

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s central thesis: this is Ahmad criticizing the discourse-first, nation-absolutizing move of postcolonial theory in parallel with Spivak’s strategic essentialism critique — the Three Worlds division forces the same essentializing that strategic essentialism weaponizes. — connects to: Metropolitan theory idealized the singularized Third World as the site of cultural opposition — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 148; Third World literary theory effaces Marxism-rooted radical cultural heritage — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 190; Postcolonial academia’s class base explains its rejection of class analysis. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 820 (+4 more)
• QUESTION: Does Ahmad’s materialist critique here map cleanly onto strategic essentialism — i.e., are the same ‘terms of discourse’ constraints binding on the ironic essentialist as on the Third-Worldist?

Broader Connections

• The Three Worlds framework erases class and gender difference within nations #expands (0.95) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 144
• Poststructuralist Third World theory arose as a substitute for failed nationalist ideology #expands (0.85) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 274
• Extreme postmodernism erases historical specificity into a millennia-old cultural constant #exemplifies (0.85) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 129
• Third-worldist nationalism regresses from the Marxist critique it displaces #corroborates (0.80)