Page 161 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

In theory: classes, nations, literatures
Dipesh Chakrabarty
■ Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London and New York:
Verso, 1992) viii + 358pp., ISBN 0-86091-372-4, £34.95 Hbk
Ahmad’s polemical book has already received much attention and comment in the
academic press. This is a combative piece of writing, aimed at scholars who in
Ahmad’s reckoning have abandoned their former Marxist, or at least socialist,
loyalties to embrace postmodernism and/or poststructuralism. Among such people
he counts Frederic Jameson, Salman Rushdie and Edward Said. Ahmad devotes
individual chapters to criticizing particular pieces written by them—an essay by
Jameson on ‘Third World literature’, Rushdie’s Shame, and Said’s Orientalism.
Ahmad is also hostile to the work of the Subaltern Studies group of historians of
India (the present reviewer is one of them), and to what he calls ‘Colonial Discourse
Analysis (CDA)’. These developments he classifies among the baneful effects of
Said’s Orientalism and of the rise of poststructuralism.
Ahmad obviously thinks that he writes as a Marxist. His Marxism, however, is
of a very particular kind. Terry Eagleton describes it on the dust jacket of the book
as a ‘devastating, courageously unfashionable critique’ that ‘has not forgotten’ the
‘radical critics [who] may have forgotten about Marxism’. Ahmad’s prose is
reminiscent of a long tradition of Communist Party writing in which the ‘enemy
within’ is always considered far more dangerous than the ‘enemy without’. The
spirit of the book is, therefore, moralistic, inquisitorial and fratricidal.
Poststructuralist thinkers are ‘reactionary’, is the summary judgement of the book.
With this near-universal tradition of CP-style criticism, Ahmad blends the very
particular flavour of what, after his own fashion, may be termed Official Indian
Marxism (OIM). OIM is the Marxism that has always found favour either with the
Nehruvian, ‘secular’ state in post-Independence India or with the official
hierarchies of the Indian Communist Parties. This tradition is Stalinist at least in
temperament and in its debating techniques even when the intellectual propositions
it defends are not specifically or explicitly grounded in Stalin’s own writings. It is
extremely suspicious of Marxists raising any fundamental questions about Marx.
And its debating techniques have three prominent characteristics: absence of any
serious interest in the intellectual-philosophical traditions from which Marx’s own
thoughts arose (so that the basic categories of Marxist thought could be treated as
being beyond criticism); a tendency toward unsubtlety in polemical positions; and
plain double standards including the unwillingness to submit one’s own thoughts
to the same tests as one requires of one’s opponent, and blatant suppression of
facts. Ahmad’s polemics exhibit all of these characteristics in varying degrees.
There are some things that Ahmad does well. In parts of the book, beginning
with Ahmad’s well-known debate with Jameson over the nature of ‘Third World
literature’ and going on to the conclusion, there runs a sustained critique of the
theoretical limitations of the Three Worlds Theory’. While Ahmad overlooks the
political and descriptive uses of the category Third World’ in certain contexts—