Western literary theory’s political turn originated in crises from anti-colonial wars

Evidence

When Marxism had proposed such a worldly approach to literature, a confident American literary Establishment had dismissed it out of hand, as mere ‘sociology’ Now, under mounting pressures, a whole range of people -only a few of them Marxist in any fashion or degreehave had to open up this buried continent of Literature to the scrutinizing gaze of history and politics. How this has come about is a complex tale, an.d this is not the occasion to tell it, but it is worth emphasizing that the emergence of this currentcomplex as it was, fragmented as it remained, and regardless of all its later detours and largely successful incorporation into poststructuralism - was connected, in its origins, with the crisis provoked in the Western academy first by the Algerian Revolution and then by the Vietnam War. It was in the crucible of those wars that at least some of the intellectuals of the contemporary West learned to question their own place in the world, and hence also to question the hegemonic closure of the texts upon which their epistemologies were based. One of the side-effects of that overall crisis was that Literature was pressed to disclose the strategic complicities whereby it had traditionally represented racesand gendersand empires. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 243

Categorization

• SEED: Worth exploring how the Algerian Revolution and Vietnam War — not internal Marxist critique — forced the American academy to politicize literary study, and how that genealogical origin was later buried under poststructuralist incorporation.
• XREF: connects to: American literary theory developed in isolation from revolutionary political history — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 657; French colonial defeats and occupation, not Asian decolonization, radicalized Western literary theory — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 175

Broader Connections

• American literary theory developed in isolation from revolutionary political history #contradicts (0.80) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 657