Page 163 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

REVIEWS 157

not leave himself much time or space within which to consider the complexities
of any question.
The book would appeal to people who already think that poststructuralist
philosophers necessarily lead us to ‘cultural relativism’ and political passivity. But
it will disappoint anybody looking for any deep philosophical engagement with
the intellectual traditions Ahmad denounces. There are about a couple of pages on
Foucault, but more characteristically ‘Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Derrida,
Glucksmann [,] Kristeva’ are usually dismissed as ‘reactionary anti-
humanists’ (pp. 192,194). There is a one-sentence formulation about ‘Nietzschean
ideas’ that makes the philosopher sound like an undergraduate student from an
English department today: ‘the Nietzschean idea that no true representation is
possible because all human communications always distort the facts’ (p. 193, see
also pp. 197, 199). It is amazing that there is not even a mention of Spivak who
would have otherwise provided such a sitting target for Ahmad’s kind of critique.
Spivak mixes Marxism with feminism and deconstructionist philosophy, she
associates herself with Subaltern Studies and calls herself a ‘post-colonial critic’—
who could be more guilty in Ahmad’s eyes? It is possible that even a ‘devastating’
and ‘courageously unfashionable’ critic like Ahmad did not have the courage to
take on feminism, who knows, but Spivak’s omission makes Ahmad’s book
literally fratricidal, an intellectual ‘pub-brawl’ among the boys. And for someone
who is so rough on academics from the subcontinent who make a living in the
West, Ahmad is remarkably silent on his own long years of teaching in the United
States. It is not that he shies away from autobiographical references—he tells us
that he was born in India, is ‘from Pakistan’, writes poetry in Urdu and now works
in Delhi (see pp. 96,104, the blurb)—yet there is not even a hint in the book of
Ahmad’s having spent years in the US academy. Instead, while every use of the
first-person plural by Said (and Nehru) is seen as ‘strategically deployed’ and
therefore ‘decoded’ and while Said is taken to task for his ahistoricisms and
essentialisms (pp. 171, 297), Ahmad blithely writes of the ‘essential unity in
structures of feeling’ that has, according to him, produced a civilizational
‘unity’ (Ahmad says ‘our unity’) in the Indian subcontinent for millennia and cites,
completely overlooking the nationalisms that gave birth to the two nation-states
of Pakistan and Bangladesh, Nehru’s Discovery of India as a text of ‘our canonical
nationalism’! No decoding now of his own ‘we’, no reflection on his own textual
strategies. Ahmad talks of ‘us’ as if somehow his ‘we’ were more natural than
Said’s. Yet that use of ‘our’ reveals how close Ahmad’s position is to the official
line of post-Independence Indian nationalism. This is again something he shares
with OIM.
If Ahmad had written a non-polemical book, he would have avoided these
pitfalls but his claims would have been modest. The importance of this book
derives from a larger scene. Some Marxist academics are now rueful that Marxism
has lost the prestige it used to enjoy in the Western academia in the 1970s. They
look on poststructuralism as a ploy of the reactionaries. Ahmad’s book comes out