Totalizing theoretical claims can erase the theorist’s professed comrades

Evidence

But then, when I was on the fifth page of this text (specifically, on the sentence starting with ‘All third-world texts are necessarily etc.), I realized that what was being theorized was, among many other things, myself. Now, I was born in India and I write poetry in Urdu, a language not commonly understood among US intellectuals. So I said to myself: ‘All? necessarily?’ It felt odd. Matters became much more curious, however. For the further I read, the more I realized, with no little chagrin, that the man whom I had for so long, so affectionately, albeit from a physical disto;tnce, taken as a comrade was, in his own opinion, my civilizational Other. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 373

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Ahmad’s broader project of materialist critique of postcolonial theory; also to how the reader tracks strategic essentialism’s collapse into genuine residence — here Jameson’s ‘necessarily’ totalizing move is the kind of discourse-determinism Ahmad finds materially evasive. — connects to: Grossmann’s pro-Soviet Marxism survived exile when fellow Institute theorists repudiated theirs — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 129; An all-encompassing discourse-determinism erases class, gender, and all resistance. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 815; Theoretical frameworks can objectify the very people they claim to describe — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 150

Broader Connections

• Theoretical frameworks can objectify the very people they claim to describe #complicates (0.80) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 150