Postcolonialism's Unsaid

Neil Larsen Postcolonialism's Unsaid (on Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures [New York: Verso, 1992]) "I seem to have said what must always remain unsaid," commented Aijaz Ahmad shortly after the publication of In Theory, responding to the many and often furious attacks directed against his book, in particular its devastating critique of the work of Edward Said (see "A Response" 174.) Word play aside, this simple and lapidary phrase seems a reasonable point of departure for a critical discussion of In Theory some four years after its first publication. What was it that Ahmad said? What might be In Theory's significance now, as the "postcolonial " becomes the latest "post" to take the academic field? And what was the ideological preserve into which In Theory happened, perhaps unwittingly, to trespass? Did the self-appointed avengers of Edward Said and of "postcolonial" theory generally (many of whom rose to the occasion in the herein-cited issue of Public Culture) have some legitimate cause for taking offense at Ahmad's intervention? And even supposing they did, has Ahmad, in saying what "must always remain unsaid," really said quite everything that needs saying? Before turning to its polemical engagements, however, it is important to state that In Theory is itself a major contribution to a range of debates in literary and cultural theory generally. In its long introductory chapter, "Literature among the Signs of our Times," for example, Ahmad lays out a brilliant political reconstruction of the history of literary theory and criticism in the post-war United States, emphasizing not only the powerful Cold War anti-Communist inflections of the New Criticism but the perhaps even more profound historical imprint on intellectual culture of a declining U.S. labor movement. (This he contrasts to the situation in Britain, where a still dynamic, if Labordominated working class could make possible the intellectual career of a Raymond Williams.) He connects—as many others have, of course— the re-introduction of marxism into North American critical discourse to the social movements of the 1960s, above all the opposition to the war in Vietnam. But where the common sense among U.S. New Left intellectuals has been to view the subsequent rise of poststructuralism here as somehow a continuation of the same radical ambience, Ahmad sharply dissents, seeing the turn to deconstruction and other text-centered doctrines as correlative with the decline of radical social consciousness that sets in after 1975 or so. Even more provocatively, Ahmad connects the rapid canonization of "Third World Literature" in 286 the minnesota review the U.S. literary academy not just to the impact of Vietnam, Cuba, Chile, etc. on the generation of intellectuals then entering literature departments, but to the fundamental ideological limitations of this broad sympathy for the cultural nationalist cause: its hesitancy to take up a more principled, class-based, socialist opposition to imperialism. Hence the quickness with which third worldism, after the definitive crisis of the national liberation movements of the so-called "Bandung era," turns to the textual "politics" of postcolonialism. These are historical -intellectual connections that, if often vaguely sensed by the aging American New Left as its own "political unconscious," themselves too often go "unsaid," and we owe to Ahmad some very salutary cage-rattling on this score. Other of In Theory's contributions include: a cumulative blueprint, assembled in the course of the volume's various essays, for a general, historical materialist critique of poststructuralist and postmodernist theory which, in atypical fashion, foregrounds the historical context of imperalism itself (for a more recent elaboration of Ahmad's critical views on poststructuralism, see his long review of Derrida's Spectres of Marx, "Reconciling Derrida"); a wonderfully cogent historical recapitulation and conclusive critique of "Three Worlds" theory itself; and a carefully balanced discussion of Marx's scattered but notorious writings on colonialism in India, in which Ahmad—in contrast to the shallowness of Said's more famous and abrupt dismissal of Marx as still another "Orientalist"—notes that Marx's observations, although limited by Eurocentrism, have often been corroborated by anti-colonial and anti-imperialist Indian historians and social critics. And finally there is a long, erudite essay on the theoretical...