Third-Worldist theory grants nationalism the quasi-religious role Christianity held in medieval Europe

Evidence

To say that allegory is the main form of writing in the Third World, and to declare that nationalism is the organizing narrative principle of this allegory, is to bestow upon Third World nationalism the quasi-religious function of a metaphysic, of the same kind that Christianity held for medieval Europe. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 550

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the reader’s notes on nationalism as ‘imagined community’ filling religious needs (Anderson/Benedict), cited in the same paragraph. — connects to: Protestant reinterpreted biblical concepts seeded modern nationalism — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 330; Claims of Third World national allegory import Romantic primitivism and Christian metaphysics onto nationalism — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1244

Related

• Claims of Third World national allegory import Romantic primitivism and Christian metaphysics onto nationalism (similarity 0.91)
• Poststructuralist Third World theory arose as a substitute for failed nationalist ideology (similarity 0.81)
• Protestant reinterpreted biblical concepts seeded modern nationalism (similarity 0.81)
• Cultural nationalism remains the constitutive ideology of Third World literary theory. (similarity 0.80)
• The Three Worlds Theory logically forces national allegory as the only narratable form (similarity 0.80)
• The category ‘Third World’ has polemical but no theoretical status (similarity 0.80)
• Third World Literature emerged only through the mediating archive of Western languages (similarity 0.79)
• Nationalism lacks fixed essence; its value depends on who wields it (similarity 0.79)
• Calling nationalism a religion begs the question of how religion is defined. (similarity 0.79)
• Cultural nationalism is constitutive of postcolonial theory’s theoretical stances. (similarity 0.79)
• The ‘Third World Literature’ category originated amid socialist retreat and bourgeois-nationalist resurgence. (similarity 0.79)
• Poststructuralist debunking of nationalism succeeded Third-Worldist nationalism as the dominant academic counter-canon (similarity 0.78)
• Frame choices that collapse politics into nationalism versus postmodernism erase socialist alternatives. (similarity 0.78)
• Third World literary theory effaces Marxism-rooted radical cultural heritage (similarity 0.78)
• Externalizing socialist practice leaves nationalism as the only conceptual frame available (similarity 0.78)