In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures

After the Second World War, nationalism emerged as the principle expression of resistance to Western imperialism in a variety of regions from the Indian subcontinent to Africa, to parts of Latin America and the Pacific Rim. With the Bandung Conference and the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement, many of Europe's former colonies banded together to form a common bloc, aligned with neither the advanced capitalist “First World” nor with the socialist “Second World.” In this historical context, the category of “Third World literature” emerged, a category that has itself spawned a whole industry of scholarly and critical studies, particularly in the metropolitan West, but increasingly in the homelands of the Third World itself.

Setting himself against the growing tendency to homogenize “Third World” literature and cultures, Aijaz Ahmad has produced a spirited critique of the major theoretical statements on “colonial discourse” and “post-colonialism,” dismantling many of the commonplaces and conceits that dominate contemporary cultural criticism. With lengthy considerations of, among others, Fredric Jameson, Edward Said, and the Subaltern Studies group, In Theory also contains brilliant analyses of the concept of Indian literature, of the genealogy of the term “Third World,” and of the conditions under which so-called “colonial discourse theory” emerged in metropolitan intellectual circles.

Erudite and lucid, Ahmad's remapping of the terrain of cultural theory is certain to provioke passionate response.

Aijaz Ahmad is Professorial Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi, India, and Professor of Political Science at York University in Ontario, Canada. He is the author of Lineages of the Present: Ideological and Political Genealogies of Contemporary South Asia, also from Verso, and is an editor, with Fred Pfeil and Modhumita Roy, of the collection A Singular Voice: Collected Writings of Michael Sprinker.