Who's Afraid of National Allegory? Jameson, Literary Criticism, Globalization

Fredric Jameson's proposal that all third world texts be read as "national allegories" has been one of the more influential and important attempts to theorize the relationship of literary production to the nation and to politics. Unfortunately, its influence and importance has thus far been primarily negative. For many critics, Jameson's essay stands as an example of what not to do when studying third world literature from the vantage point of the first-world academy. His attempt in the now infamous essay, "Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism," to delineate "some general theory of what is often called third-world literature" has been attacked for its very desire for generality. ¹ The presumption that it is possible to produce a theory that would explain African, Asian, and Latin American literary production, the literature of China and Senegal, has been (inevitably) read as nothing more than a patronizing, theoretical orientalism, or as yet another example of a troubling appropriation of Otherness with the aim of exploring the West rather than the Other. The most well-known criticism of Jameson's essay along these lines remains Aijaz Ahmad's "Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory.'" ² More informally and anecdotally, however, within the field of postcolonial literary and cultural studies, Jameson's essay has come to be treated as little more than a cautionary tale about the extent and depth of Eurocentrism in the Western academy, or, even more commonly, as a convenient bibliographic marker of those kinds of theories of third world literature that everyone now agrees are limiting and reductive. ³

Looking back on Jameson's essay through the haze of fifteen years of postcolonial studies, as well as the through the equally disorienting smoke thrown up by the explosion of theories and positions on globalization, one wonders what all the fuss was about. In hindsight, it appears that almost without exception critics of Jameson's essay have willfully misread it. Of course, such misreadings are to be expected. The reception given to this or that theory has as much to do with timing as with its putative content. As one of the first responses to postcolonial literary studies from a major critic outside the field, the publication of Jameson's essay in the mid-1980s provided postcolonial critics with a flash point around which to articulate general criticisms of dominant views of North-South relations expressed within even supposedly critical political theories (like Marxism). It also provided a self-definitional opportunity for postcolonial studies: a shift away from even the lingering traces of Marxist interpretations of imperialism toward a more deconstructive one exemplified by the work of figures such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi Bhabha. ⁴ While criticisms of Jameson's views may have thus been useful or productive in their own way, they have nevertheless tended to obscure and misconstrue a sophisticated attempt to make sense of the relationship of literature to politics in the decolonizing world. I want to argue here that Jameson's "general" theory of third world literary production offers a way of conceptualizing the relationship of literature to politics (and politics to literature) that goes beyond the most common (and commonsense) understanding of the relations between these terms. ⁵ Indeed, the concept of national allegory introduces a model for a properly materialist approach to postcolonial texts and contexts, one that resonates with Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks's recent characterization of postcolonial studies as "interested above all in materialist critiques of power and how that power or ideology seems to interpellate subjects within a discourse as subordinate and without agency." ⁶

Crooks's description of the aims of postcolonial studies emerges out of her analysis of the malaise or melancholia that has beset postcolonial studies as it enters the new millennium. It seems to me that revisiting Jameson's theory of third world literature—both its problems and...