Submit THREE questions and explanations in total.
1-2 pages, double-spaced, Time New Roman 12
After you read the readings, come up with 3 questions on your own.
2 questions from Jameson
1 question from Ahmad
You are required to formulate questions in the way in which they address the main points of the assigned texts and the questions should demonstrate that you have read the readings. For each question, you are also required to provide an explanation of why the main idea of the readings is important.
Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism
Author(s): Fredric Jameson
Source: Social Text, No. 15 (Autumn, 1986), pp. 65-88
Published by: Duke University Press
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Third-World Literature in the Era of
Multinational Capitalism
FREDRIC JAMESON
Judging from recent conversations among third-world intellectuals, there is
now an obsessive return of the national situation itself, the name of the country
that returns again and again like a gong, the collective attention to “us” and what
we have to do and how we do it, to what we can’t do and what we do better than
this or that nationality, our unique characteristics, in short, to the level of the
“people.” This is not the way American intellectuals have been discussing
“America,” and indeed one might feel that the whole matter is nothing but that
old thing called “nationalism,” long since liquidated here and rightly so. Yet a
certain nationalism is fundamental in the third world (and also in the most vital
areas of the second world), thus making it legitimate to ask whether it is all that
bad in the end.’ Does in fact the message of some disabused and more experienced
first-world wisdom (that of Europe even more than of the United States) consist in
urging these nation states to outgrow it as fast as possible? The predictble remin-
ders of Kampuchea and of Iraq and Iran do not really seem to me to settle
anything or suggest by what these nationalisms might be replaced except perhaps
some global American postmodernist culture.
Many arguments can be made for the importance and interest of non-
canonical forms of literature such as that of the third world,2 but one is peculiarly
self-defeating because it borrows the weapons of the adversary: the strategy of
trying to prove that these texts are as “great” as those of the canon itself. The
object is then to show that, to take an example from another non-canonical form,
Dashiell Hammett is really as great as Dostoyevsky, and therefore can be admitted.
This is to attempt dutifully to wish away all traces of that “pulp” format which is
constitutive of sub-genres, and it invites immediate failure insofar as any passion-
ate reader of Dostoyevsky will know at once, after a few pages, that those kinds of
satisfactions are not present. Nothing is to be gained by passing over in silence the
radical difference of non-canonical texts. The third-world novel will not offer the
satisfactions of Proust or Joyce; what is more damaging than that, perhaps, is its
tendency to remind us of outmoded stages of our own first-world cultural de-
velopment and to cause us to conclude that “they are still writing novels like
Dreiser or Sherwood Anderson.”
A case could be built on this kind of discouragement, with its deep existential
commitment to a rhythm of modernist innovation if not fashion-changes; but it
65
Fredric Jameson
would not be a moralizing one-a historicist one, rather, which challenges our
imprisonment in the present of postmodernism and calls for a reinvention of the
radical difference of our own cultural past and its now seemingly old-fashioned
situations and novelties.
But I would rather argue all this a different way, at least for now3: these
reactions to third-world texts are at one and the same time perfectly natural,
perfectly comprehensible, and terribly parochial. If the purpose of the canon is to
restrict our aesthetic sympathies, to develop a range of rich and subtle perceptions
which can be exercised only on the occasion of a small but choice body of texts, to
discourage us from reading anything else or from reading those things in different
ways, then it is humanly impoverishing. Indeed our want of sympathy for these
often unmodern third-world texts is itself frequently but a disguise for some
deeper fear of the affluent about the way people actually live in other parts of the
world-a way of life that still has little in common with daily life in the American
suburb. There is nothing particularly disgraceful in having lived a sheltered life, in
never having had to confront the difficulties, the complications and the frustra-
tions of urban living, but it is nothing to be particularly proud of either. Moreover,
a limited experience of life normally does not make for a wide range of sympathies
with very different kinds of people (I’m thinking of differences that range from
gender and race all the way to those of social class and culture).
The way in which all this affects the reading process seems to be as follows: as
western readers whose tastes (and much else) have been formed by our own
modernisms, a popular or socially realistic third-world novel tends to come before
us, not immediately, but as though already-read. We sense, between ourselves and
this alien text, the presence of another reader, of the Other reader, for whom a
narrative, which strikes us as conventional or naive, has a freshness of information
and a social interest that we cannot share. The fear and the resistance I’m evoking
has to do, then, with the sense of our own non-coincidence with that Other reader,
so different from ourselves; our sense that to coincide in any adequate way with
that Other “ideal reader”-that is to say, to read this text adequately-we would
have to give up a great deal that is individually precious to us and acknowledge an
existence and a situation unfamiliar and therefore frightening-one that we do
not know and prefer not to know.
Why, returning to the question of the canon, should we only read certain
kinds of books? No one is suggesting we should not read those, but why should we
not also read other ones? We are not, after all, being shipped to that “desert
island” beloved of the devisers of great books lists. And as a matter of fact-and
this is to me the conclusive nail in the argument-we all do “read” many different
kinds of texts in this life of ours, since, whether we are willing to admit it or not,
we spend much of our existence in the force field of a mass culture that is radically
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Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism
different from our “great books” and live at least a double life in the various
compartments of our unavoidably fragmented society. We need to be aware that
we are even more fundamentally fragmented than that; rather than clinging to this
particular mirage of the “centered subject” and the unified personal identity, we
would do better to confront honestly the fact of fragmentation on a global scale; it
is a confrontation with which we can here at least make a cultural beginning.
A final observation on my use of the term “third world.” I take the point of
criticisms of this expression, particularly those which stress the way in which it
obliterates profound differences between a whole range of non-western countries
and situations (indeed, one such fundamental opposition-between the traditions
of the great eastern empires and those of the post-colonial African nation states-
is central in what follows). I don’t, however, see any comparable expression that
articulates, as this one does, the fundamental breaks between the capitalist first
world, the socialist bloc of the second world, and a range of other countries which
have suffered the experience of colonialism and imperialism. One can only deplore
the ideological implications of oppositions such as that between “developed” and
“underdeveloped” or “developing” countries; while the more recent conception of
northern and southern tiers, which has a very different ideological content and
import than the rhetoric of development, and is used by very different people,
nonetheless implies an unquestioning acceptance of “convergence theory”-
namely the idea that the Soviet Union and the United States are from this perspec-
tive largely the same thing. I am using the term “third world” in an essentially
descriptive sense, and objections to it do not strike me as especially relevant to the
argument I am making.
In these last years of the century, the old question of a properly world litera-
ture reasserts itself. This is due as much or more to the disintegration of our own
conceptions of cultural study as to any very lucid awareness of the great outside
world around us. We may therefore-as “humanists”-acknowledge the perti-
nence of the critique of present-day humanities by our titular leader, William
Bennett, without finding any great satisfaction in his embarrassing solution: yet
another impoverished and ethnocentric Graeco-Judaic “great books list’ of the
civilization of the West,” “great texts, great minds, great ideas.”4 One is tempted
to turn back on Bennett himself the question he approvingly quotes from Maynard
Mack: “How long can a democratic nation afford to support a narcissistic minor-
ity so transfixed by its own image?” Nevertheless, the present moment does offer a
remarkable opportunity to rethink our humanities curriculum in a new way-to
re-examine the shambles and ruins of all our older “great books,” “humanities,”
“freshman-introductory” and “core course” type traditions.
67
Fredric Jameson
Today the reinvention of cultural studies in the United States demands the
reinvention, in a new situation, of what Goethe long ago theorized as “world
literature.” In our more immediate context, then, any conception of world litera-
ture necessarily demands some specific engagement with the question of third-
world literature, and it is this not necessarily narrower subject about which I have
something to say today.
It would be presumptuous to offer some general theory of what is often called
third-world literature, given the enormous variety both of national cultures in the
third world and of specific historical trajectories in each of those areas. All of this,
then, is provisional and intended both to suggest specific perspectives for research
and to convey a sense of the interest and value of these clearly neglected literatures
for people formed by the values and stereotypes of a first-world culture. One
important distinction would seem to impose itself at the outset, namely that none
of these cultures can be conceived as anthropologically independent or autonom-
ous, rather, they are all in various distinct ways locked in a life-and-death struggle
with first-world cultural imperialism-a cultural struggle that is itself a reflexion
of the economic situation of such areas in their penetration by various stages of
capital, or as it is sometimes euphemistically termed, of modernization. This, then,
is some first sense in which a study of third-world culture necessarily entails a new
view of ourselves, from the outside, insofar as we ourselves are (perhaps without
fully knowing it) constitutive forces powerfully at work on the remains of older
cultures in our general world capitalist system.
But if this is the case, the initial distinction that imposes itself has to do with
the nature and development of older cultures at the moment of capitalist penetra-
tion, something it seems to me most enlightening to examine in terms of the
marxian concept of modes of production.5 Contemporary historians seem to be in
the process of reaching a consensus on the specificity of feudalism as a form
which, issuing from the break-up of the Roman Empire or the Japanese Shogu-
nate, is able to develop directly into capitalism.6 This is not the case with the other
modes of production, which in some sense must be disaggregated or destroyed by
violence, before capitalism is able to implant its specific forms and displace the
older ones. In the gradual expansion of capitalism across the globe, then, our
economic system confronts two very distinct modes of production that pose two
very different types of social and cultural resistance to its influence. These are
so-called primitive, or tribal society on the one hand, and the Asiatic mode of
production, or the great bureaucratic imperial systems, on the other. African
societies and cultures, as they became the object of systematic colonization in the
1880s, provide the most striking examples of the symbiosis of capital and tribal
societies; while China and India offer the principal examples of another and quite
different sort of engagement of capitalism with the great empires of the so-called
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Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism
Asiatic mode. My examples below, then, will be primarily African and Chinese;
however, the special case of Latin America must be noted in passing. Latin
America offers yet a third kind of development-one involving an even earlier
destruction of imperial systems now projected by collective memory back into the
archaic or tribal. Thus the earlier nominal conquests of independence open them at
once to a kind of indirect economic penetration and control-something Africa
and Asia will come to experience only more recently with decolonization in the
1950s and 60s.
Having made these initial distinctions, let me now, by way of a sweeping
hypothesis, try to say what all third-world cultural productions seem to have in
common and what distinguishes them radically from analogous cultural forms in
the first world. All third-world texts are necessarily, I want to argue, allegorical,
and in a very specific way: they are to be read as what I will call national allegories,
even when, or perhaps I should say, particularly when their forms develop out of
predominantly western machineries of representation, such as the novel. Let me
try to state this distinction in a grossly oversimplified way: one of the determinants
of capitalist culture, that is, the culture of the western realist and modernist novel,
is a radical split between the private and the public, between the poetic and the
political, between what we have come to think of as the domain of sexuality and
the unconscious and that of the public world of classes, of the economic, and of
secular political power: in other words, Freud versus Marx. Our numerous
theoretical attempts to overcome this great split only reconfirm its existence and its
shaping power over our individual and collective lives. We have been traiAed in a
deep cultural conviction that the lived experience of our private existences is
somehow incommensurable with the abstractions of economic science and politi-
cal dynamics. Politics in our novels therefore is, according to Stendhal’s canonical
formulation, a “pistol shot in the middle of a concert.”
I will argue that, although we may retain for convenience and for analysis
such categories as the subjective and the public or political, the relations between
them are wholly different in third-world culture. Third-world texts, even those
which are seemingly private and invested with a properly libidinal dynamic-
necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory: the story
of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of
the public third-world culture and society. Need I add that it is precisely this very
different ratio of the political to the personal which makes such texts alien to us at
first approach, and consequently, resistant to our conventional western habits of
reading?
I will offer, as something like the supreme example of this process of allegori-
zation, the first masterwork of China’s greatest writer, Lu Xun, whose neglect in
western cultural studies is a matter of shame which no excuses based on ignorance
69
Fredric Jameson
can rectify. “Diary of a Madman” (1918) must at first be read by any western
reader as the protocol of what our essentially psychological language terms a
“nervous breakdown.” It offers the notes and perceptions of a subject in intensify-
ing prey to a terrifying psychic delusion, the conviction that the people around him
are concealing a dreadful secret, and that that secret can be none other than the
increasingly obvious fact that they are cannibals. At the climax of the development
of the delusion, which threatens his own physical safety and his very life itself as a
potential victim, the narrator understands that his own brother is himself a canni-
bal and that the death of their little sister, a number of years earlier, far from being
the result of childhood illness, as he had thought, was in reality a murder. As befits
the protocol of a psychosis, these perceptions are objective ones, which can be
rendered without any introspective machinery: the paranoid subject observes
sinister glances around him in the real world, he overhears tell-tale conversations
between his brother and an alleged physician (obviously in reality another canni-
bal) which carry all the conviction of the real, and can be objectively (or “realisti-
cally”) represented. This is not the place to demonstrate in any detail the absolute
pertinence, to Lu Xun’s case history, of the pre-eminent western or first-world
reading of such phenomena, namely Freud’s interpretation of the paranoid delu-
sions of Senatsprasident Schreber: an emptying of the world, a radical withdrawal
of libido (what Schreber describes as “world-catastrophe”), followed by the at-
tempt to recathect by the obviously imperfect mechanisms of paranoia. “The
delusion-formation,” Freud explains, “which we take to be a pathological pro-
duct, is in reality an attempt at recovery, a process of reconstruction.”7
What is reconstructed, however, is a grisly and terrifying objective real world
beneath the appearances of our own world: an unveiling or deconcealment of the
nightmarish reality of things, a stripping away of our conventional illusions or
rationalizations about daily life and existence. It is a process comparable, as a
literary effect, only to some of the processes of western modernism, and in particu-
lar of existentialism, in which narrative is employed as a powerful instrument for
the experimental exploration of reality and illusion, an exploration which, how-
ever, unlike some of the older realisms, presupposes a certain prior “personal
knowledge.” The reader must, in other words, have had some analogous experi-
ence, whether in physical illness or psychic crisis, of a lived and balefully trans-
formed real world from which we cannot even mentally escape, for the full horror
of Lu Xun’s nightmare to be appreciated. Terms like “depression” deform such
experience by psychologizing it and projecting it back into the pathological Other;
while the analogous western literary approaches to this same experience-I’m
thinking of the archetypal deathbed murmur of Kurtz, in Conrad’s “Heart of
Darkness,” “The horror! the horror!”-recontains precisely that horror by trans-
forming it into a rigorously private and subjective “mood,” which can only be
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Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism
designated by recourse to an aesthetic of expression-the unspeakable, unname-
able inner feeling, whose external formulation can only designate it from without,
like a symptom.
But this representational power of Lu Xun’s text cannot be appreciated prop-
erly without some sense of what I have called its allegorical resonance. For it
should be clear that the cannibalism literally apprehended by the sufferer in the
attitudes and bearing of his family and neighbors is at one and the same time being
attributed by Lu Xun himself to Chinese society as a whole: and if this attribution
is to be called “figural,” it is indeed a figure more powerful and “literal” than the
“literal” level of the text. Lu Xun’s proposition is that the people of this great
maimed and retarded, disintegrating China of the late and post-imperial period,
his fellow citizens, are “literally” cannibals: in their desperation, disguised and
indeed intensified by the most traditional forms and procedures of Chinese cul-
ture, they must devour one another ruthlessly to stay alive. This occurs at all levels
of that exceedingly hierarchical society, from lumpens and peasants all the way to
the most privileged elite positions in the mandarin bureaucracy. It is, I want to
stress, a social and historical nightmare, a vision of the horror of life specifically
grasped through History itself, whose consequences go far beyond the more local
western realistic or naturalistic representation of cut-throat capitalist or market
competition, and it exhibits a specifically political resonance absent from its
natural or mythological western equivalent in the nightmare of Darwinian natural
selection.
Now I want to offer four additional remarks about this text, which will touch,
respectively, on the libidinal dimension of the story, on the structure of its allegory,
on the role of the third-world cultural producer himself, and on the perspective of
futurity projected by the tale’s double resolution. I will be concerned, in dealing
with all four of these topics, to stress the radical structural difference between the
dynamics of third-world culture and those of the first-world cultural tradition in
which we have ourselves been formed.
I have suggested that in third-world texts such as this story by Lu Xun the
relationship between the libidinal and the political components of individual and
social experience is radically different from what obtains in the west and what
shapes our own cultural forms. Let me try to characterize this difference, or if you
like this radical reversal, by way of the following generalization: in the west,
conventionally, political commitment is recontained and psychologized or subjec-
tivized by way of the public-private split I have already evoked. Interpretations, for
example, of political movements of the 60s in terms of Oedipal revolts are familiar
to everyone and need no further comment. That such interpretations are episodes
in a much longer tradition, whereby political commitment is re-psychologized and
accounted for in terms of the subjective dynamics of ressentiment or the authorita-
71
Fredric Jameson
rian personality, is perhaps less well understood, but can be demonstrated by a
careful reading of anti-political texts from Nietzsche and Conrad all the way to the
latest cold-war propaganda.
What is relevant to our present context is not, however, the demonstration of
that proposition, but rather of its inversion in third-world culture, where I want to
suggest that psychology, or more specifically, libidinal investment, is to be read in
primarily political and social terms. (It is, I hope, unnecessary to add that what
follows is speculative and very much subject to correction by specialists: it is
offered as a methodological example rather than a “theory” of Chinese culture.)
We’re told, for on thing, that the great ancient imperial cosmologies identify by
analogy what we in the west analytically separate: thus, the classical sex manuals
are at one with the texts that reveal the dynamics of political forces, the charts of
the heavens at one with the logic of medical lore, and so forth.8 Here already then,
in an ancient past, western antinomies-and most particularly that between the
subjective and the public or political-are refused in advance. The libidinal center
of Lu Xun’s text is, however, not sexuality, but rather the oral stage, the whole
bodily question of eating, of ingestion, devoration, incorporation, from which
such fundamental categories as the pure and the impure spring. We must now
recall, not merely the extraordinary symbolic complexity of Chinese cuisine, but
also the central role this art and practice occupies in Chinese culture as a whole.
When we find that centrality confirmed by the observation that the very rich
Chinese vocabulary for sexual matters is extraordinarily intertwined with the
language of eating; and when we observe the multiple uses to which the verb “to
eat” is put in ordinary Chinese language (one “eats” a fear or a fright, for
example), we may feel in a somewhat better position to sense the enormous
sensitivity of this libidinal region, and of Lu Xun’s mobilization of it for the
dramatization of an essentially social nightmare-something which in a western
writer would be consigned to the realm of the merely private obsession, the vertical
dimension of the personal trauma.
A different alimentary transgression can be observed throughout Lu Xun’s
works, but nowhere quite so strikingly as in his terrible little story, “Medicine.”
The story potrays a dying child-the death of children is a constant in these
works-whose parents have the good fortune to procure an “infallible” remedy.
At this point we must recall both that traditional Chinese medicine is not “taken,”
as in the west, but “eaten,” and that for Lu Xun traditional Chinese medicine was
the supreme locus of the unspeakable and exploitative charlatanry of traditional
Chinese culture in general. In his crucially important Preface to the first collection
of his stories,9 he recounts the suffering and death of his own father from tuber-
culosis, while declining family reserves rapidly disappeared into the purchase of
expensive and rare, exotic and ludicrous medicaments. We will not sense the
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Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism
symbolic significance of this indignation unless we remember that for all these
reasons Lu Xun decided to study western medicine in Japan-the epitome of some
new western science that promised collective regeneration-only later to decide
that the production of culture-I am tempted to say, the elaboration of a political
culture-was a more effective form of political medicine.10 As a writer, then, Lu
Xun remains a diagnostician and a physician. Hence this terrible story, in which
the cure for the male child, the father’s only hope for survival in future genera-
tions, turns out to be one of those large doughy-white Chinese steamed rolls,
soaked in the blood of a criminal who has just been executed. The child dies
anyway, of course, but it is important to note that the hapless victim of a more
properly state violence (the supposed crimihal) was a political militant, whose
grave is mysteriously covered in flowers by absent sympathizers of whom one
knows nothing. In the analysis of a story like this, we must rethink our conven-
tional conception of the symbolic levels of a narrative (where sexuality and politics
might be in homology to each other, for instance) as a set of loops or circuits which
intersect and overdetermine each other-the enormity of therapeutic cannibalism
finally intersecting in a pauper’s cemetery, with the more overt violence of family
betrayal and political repression.
This new mapping process brings me to the cautionary remark I wanted to
make about allegory itself-a form long discredited in the west and the specific
target of the Romantic revolution of Wordsworth and Coleridge, yet a linguistic
structure which also seems to be experiencing a remarkable reawakening of in-
terest in contemporary literary theory. If allegory has once again become somehow
congenial for us today, as over against the massive and monumental unifications of
an older modernist symbolism or even realism itself, it is because the allegorical
spirit is profoundly discontinuous, a matter of breaks and heterogeneities, of the
multiple polysemia of the dream rather than the homogeneous representation of
the symbol. Our traditional conception of allegory-based, for instance, on
stereotypes of Bunyan-is that of an elaborate set of figures and personifications
to be read against some one-to-one table of equivalences: this is, so to speak, a
one-dimensional view of this signifying process, which might only be set in motion
and complexified were we willing to entertain the more alarming notion that such
equivalences are themselves in constant change and transformation at each per-
petual present of the text.
Here too Lu Xun has some lessons for us. This writer of short stories and
sketches, which never evolved into the novel form as such, produced at least one
approach to the longer form, in a much lengthier series of anecdotes about a
hapless coolie named Ah Q, who comes to serve, as we might have suspected, as
the allegory of a certain set of Chinese attitudes and modes of behavior. It is
interesting to note that the enlargement of the form determines a shift in tone or
73
Fredric Jameson
generic discourse: now everything that had been stricken with the stillness and
emptiness of death and suffering without hope-“the room was not only too
silent, it was far too big as well, and the things in it were far too empty”‘–
becomes material for a more properly Chaplinesque comedy. Ah Q’s resiliency
springs from an unusual-but we are to understand culturally very normal and
familiar-technique for overcoming humiliation. When set upon by his perse-
cutors, Ah Q, serene in his superiority over them, reflects: “‘It is as if I were beaten
by my own son. What is the world coming to nowadays…’ Thereupon he too
would walk away, satisfied at having won.”12 Admit that you are not even human,
they insist, that you are nothing but an animal! On the contrary, he tells them, I’m
worse than an animal, I’m an insect! There, does that satisfy you? “In less than ten
seconds, however, Ah Q would walk away also satisfied that he had won, thinking
that he was after all ‘number one in self-belittlement,’ and that after removing the
‘self-belittlement’ what remained was still the glory of remaining ‘number one.'”13
When one recalls the remarkable self-esteem of the Manchu dynasty in its final
throes, and the serene contempt for foreign devils who had nothing but modern
science, gunboats, armies, technology and power to their credit, one achieves a
more precise sense of the historical and social topicality of Lu Xun’s satire.
Ah Q is thus, allegorically, China itself. What I want to observe, however,
what complicates the whole issue, is that his persecutors-the idlers and bullies
who find their daily pleasures in getting a rise out of just such miserable victims.as
Ah Q-they too are China, in the allegorical sense. This very simple example,
then, shows the capacity of allegory to generate a range of distinct meanings or
messages, simultaneously, as the allegorical tenor and vehicle change places: Ah Q
is China humiliated by the foreigners, a China so well versed in the spiritual
techniques of self-justification that such humiliations are not even registered, let
alone recalled. But the persecutors are also China, in a different sense, the terrible
self-cannibalistic China of the “Diary of a Madman,” whose response to power-
lessness is the senseless persecution of the weaker and more inferior members of
the hierarchy.
All of which slowly brings us to the question of the writer himself in the third
world, and to what must be called the function of the intellectual, it being under-
stood that in the third-world situation the intellectual is always in one way or
another a political intellectual. No third-world lesson is more timely or more
urgent for us today, among whom the very term “intellectual” has withered away,
as though it were the name for an extinct species. Nowhere has the strangeness of
this vacant position been brought home to me more strongly than on a recent trip
to Cuba, when I had occasion to visit a remarkable college-preparatory school on
the outskirts of Havana. It is a matter of some shame for an American to witness
the cultural curriculum in a socialist setting which also very much identifies itself
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Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism
with the third world. Over some three or four years, Cuban teenagers study poems
of Homer, Dante’s Inferno, the Spanish theatrical classics, the great realistic novels
of the 19th-century European tradition, and finally contemporary Cuban re-
volutionary novels, of which, incidentally, we desperately need English transla-
tions. But the semester’s work I found most challenging was one explicitly devoted
to the study of the role of the intellectual as such: the cultural intellectual who is
also a political militant, the intellectual who produces both poetry and praxis.
The Cuban illustrations of this process-Ho Chi Minh and Augustino Nieto-are
obviously enough culturally determined: our own equivalents would probably be
the more familiar figures of DuBois and C.L.R. James, of Sartre and Neruda or
Brecht, of Kollontai or Louise Michel. But as this whole talk aims implicitly at
suggesting a new conception of the humanities in American education today, it is
appropriate to add that the study of the role of the intellectual as such ought to be
a key component in any such proposals.
I’ve already said something about Lu Xun’s own conception of his vocation,
and its extrapolation from the practice of medicine. But there is a great deal more
to be said specifically about the Preface. Not only is it one of the fundamental
documents for understanding the situation of the third world artist, it is also a
dense text in its own right, fully as much a work of art as any of the greatest
stories. And in Lu Xun’s own work it is the supreme example of the very unusual
ratio of subjective investment and a deliberately depersonalized objective narra-
tion. We have no time to do justice to those relationships, which would demand a
line-by-line commentary. Yet I will quote the little fable by which Lu Xun, re-
sponding to requests for publication by his friends and future collaborators,
dramatizes his dilemma:
Imagine an iron house without windows, absolutely indestructible, with many
people fast sleep inside who will shortly die of suffocation. But you know that
since they will die in their sleep, they will not feel the pain of death. Now if you
cry aloud to wake a few of the lighter sleepers, making those unfortunate few
suffer the agony of irrevocable death, do you think you are doing them a good
turn?14
The seemingly hopeless situation of the third-world intellectual in this historical
period (shortly after the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, but also after
the bankruptcy of the middle-class revolution had become apparent)-in which
no solutions, no forms of praxis or change, seem conceivable-this situation will
find its parallel, as we shall see shortly, in the situation of African intellectuals after
the achievement of independence, when once again no political solutions seem
present or visible on the historical horizon. The formal or literary manifestation of
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76 Fredric Jameson
this political problem is the possibility of narrative closure, something we will
return to more specifically.
In a more general theoretical context-and it is this theoretical form of the
problem I should now like at least to thematize and set in place on the agenda-we
must recover a sense of what “cultural revolution” means, in its strongest form, in
the marxist tradition. The reference is not to the immediate events of that violent
and tumultuous interruption of the “eleven years” in recent Chinese history, al-
though some reference to Maoism as a doctrine is necessarily implicit. The term,
we are told, was Lenin’s own, and in that form explicitly designated the literacy
campaign and the new problems of universal scholarity and education: something
of which Cuba, again, remains the most stunning and successful example in recent
history. We must, however, enlarge the conception still further, to include a range
of seemingly very different preoccupations, of which the names of Gramsci and
Wilhelm Reich, Frantz Fanon, Herbert Marcuse, Rudolph Bahro, and Paolo
Freire, may give an indication of their scope and focus. Overhastily, I will suggest
that “cultural revolution” as it is projected in such works turns on the phenome-
non of what Gramsci called “subalternity,” namely the feelings of mental inferior-
ity and habits of subservience and obedience which necessarily and structurally
develop in situations of domination-most dramatically in the experience of col-
onized peoples. But here, as so often, the subjectivizing and psychologizing habits
of first-world peoples such as ourselves can play us false and lead us into misun-
derstandings. Subalternity is not in that sense a psychological matter, although it
governs psychologies; and I suppose that the strategic choice of the term “cul-
tural” aims precisely at restructuring that view of the problem and projecting it
outwards into the realm of objective or collective spirit in some non-psychological,
but also non-reductionist or non-economistic, materialistic fashion. When a
psychic structure is objectively determined by economic and political relation-
ships, it cannot be dealt with by means of purely psychological therapies; yet it
equally cannot be dealt with by means of purely objective transformations of the
economic and political situation itself, since the habits remain and exercise a
baleful and crippling residual effect.15 This is a more dramatic form of that old
mystery, the unity of theory and practice; and it is specifically in the context of this
problem of cultural revolution (now so strange and alien to us) that the achieve-
ments and failures of third-world intellectuals, writers and artists must be re-
placed if their concrete historical meaning is to be grasped. We have allowed
ourselves, as first-world cultural intellectuals, to restrict our consciousness of our
life’s work to the narrowest professional or bureaucratic terms, thereby encourag-
ing in ourselves a special sense of subalternity and guilt, which only reinforces the
vicious circle. That a literary article could be a political act, with real consequ-
ences, is for most of us little more than a curiosity of the literary history of Czarist
Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism
Russia or of modern China itself. But we perhaps should also consider the possibil-
ity that as intellectuals we ourselves are at present soundly sleeping in that inde-
structable iron room, of which Lu Xun spoke, on the point of suffocation.
The matter of narrative closure, then, and of the relationship of a narrative
text to futurity and to some collective project yet to come, is not, merely a formal
or literary-critical issue. “Diary of a Madman” has in fact two distinct and incom-
patible endings, which prove instructive to examine in light of the writer’s own
hesitations and anxieties about his social role. One ending, that of the deluded
subject himself, is very much a call to the future, in the impossible situation of a
well-nigh universal cannibalism: the last desperate lines launched into the void are
the words, “Save the children . .” But the tale has a second ending as well, which
is disclosed on the opening page, when the older (supposedly cannibalistic)
brother greets the narrator with the following cheerful remark: “I appreciate your
coming such a long way to see us, but my brother recovered some time ago and has
gone elsewhere to take up an official post.” So, in advance, the nightmare is
annulled; the paranoid visionary, his brief and terrible glimpse of the grisly reality
beneath the appearance now vouchsafed, gratefully returns to the realm of illusion
and oblivion therein again to take up his place in the space of bureaucratic power
and privilege. I want to suggest that it is only at this price, by way of a complex
play of simultaneous and antithetical messages, that the narrative text is able to
open up a concrete perspective on the real future.
x- x- *s-
I must interrupt myself here to interpolate several observations before pro-
ceeding. For one thing, it is clear to me that any articulation of radical
difference-that of gender, incidentally, fully as much as that of culture-is sus-
ceptible to appropriation by that strategy of otherness which Edward Said, in the
context of the Middle East, called “orientalism.” It does not matter much that the
radical otherness of the culture in question is praised or valorized positively, as in
the preceding pages: the essential operation is that of differentiation, and once that
has been accomplished, the mechanism Said denounces has been set in place. On
the other hand, I don’t see how a first-world intellectual can avoid this operation
without falling back into some general liberal and humanistic universalism: it
seems to me that one of our basic political tasks lies precisely in the ceaseless effort
to remind the American public of the radical difference of other national situa-
tions.
But at this point one should insert a cautionary reminder about the dangers of
the concept of “culture” itself: the very speculative remarks I have allowed myself
to make about Chinese “culture” will not be complete unless I add that “culture”
in this sense is by no means the final term at which one stops. One must imagine
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Fredric Jameson
such cultural structures and attitudes as having been themselves, in the beginning,
vital responses to infrastructural realities (economic and geographic, for example),
as attempts to resolve more fundamental contradictions-attempts which then
outlive the situations for which they were devised, and survive, in reified forms, as
“cultural patterns.” Those patterns themselves then become part of the objective
situation confronted by later generations, and, as in the case of Confucianism,
having once been part of the solution to a dilemma, then become part of the new
problem.
Nor can I feel that the concept of cultural “identity” or even national “iden-
tity” is adequate. One cannot acknowledge the justice of the general poststruc-
turalist assault on the so-called “centered subject,” the old unified ego of
bourgeois individualism, and then resuscitate this same ideological mirage of
psychic unification on the collective level in the form of a doctrine of collective
identity. Appeals to collective identity need to be evaluated from a historical
perspective, rather than from the standpoint of some dogmatic and placeless
“ideological analysis.” When a third-world writer invokes this (to us) ideological
value, we need to examine the concrete historical situation closely in order to
determine the political consequences of the strategic use of this concept. Lu Xun’s
moment, for example, is very clearly one in which a critique of Chinese “culture”
and “cultural identity” has powerful and revolutionary consequences-
consequences which may not obtain in a later social configuration. This is then,
perhaps, another and more complicated way of raising the issue of “nationalism”
to which I referred earlier.
As far as national allegory is concerned, I think it may be appropriate to stress
its presence in what is generally considered western literature in order to under-
score certain structural differences. The example I have in mind is the work of
Benito Perez Galdos-the last and among the richest achievements of 19th century
realism. Galdos’ novels are more visibly allegorical (in the national sense) than
most of their better-known European predecessors: 16 something that might well be
explained in terms of Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system terminology.17 Al-
though 19th century Spain is not strictly peripheral after the fashion of the coun-
tries we are here designating under the term third world, it is certainly semi-
peripheral in his sense, when contrasted with England or France. It is therefore not
terribly surprising to find the situation of the male protagonist of Fortunata y
Jacinta (1887)-alternating between the two women of the title, between the wife
and the mistress, between the woman of the upper-middle classes and the woman
of the “people”-characterized in terms of the nation-state itself, hesitating be-
tween the republican revolution of 1868 and the Bourbon restoration of 1873.18
Here too, the same “floating” or transferable structure of allegorical reference
detected in Ah Q comes into play: for Fortunata is also married, and the alterna-
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tion of “revolution” and “restoration” is likewise adapted to her situation, as she
leaves her legal home to seek her lover and then returns to it in abandonment.
What it is important to stress is not merely the wit of the analogy as Galdos
uses it, but also its optional nature: we can use it to convert the entire situation of
the novel into an allegorical commentary on the destiny of Spain, but we are also
free to reverse its priorities and to read the political analogy as metaphorical
decoration for the individual drama, and as a mere figural intensification of this
last. Here, far from dramatizing the identity of the political and the individual or
psychic, the allegorical structure tends essentially to separate these levels in some
absolute way. We cannot feel its force unless we are convinced of the radical
difference between politics and the libidinal: so that its operation reconfirms
(rather than annuls) that split between public and private which was attributed to
western civilization earlier in our discussion. In one of the more powerful contem-
porary denunciations of this split and this habit, Deleuze and Guattari argue for a
conception of desire that is at once social and individual.
How does a delirium begin? Perhaps the cinema is able to capture the movement
of madness, precisely because it is not analytical or regressive, but explores a
global field of coexistence. Witness a film by Nicholas Ray, supposedly represent-
ing the formation of a cortisone delirium: an overworked father, a high-school
teacher who works overtime for a radio-taxi service and is being treated for heart
trouble. He begins to rave about the educational system in general, the need to
restore a pure race, the salvation of the social and moral order, then he passes to
religion, the timeliness of a return to the Bible, Abraham. But what in fact did
Abraham do? Well now, he killed or wanted to kill his son, and perhaps God’s
only error lies in having stayed his hand. But doesn’t this man, the film’s pro-
tagonist, have a son of his own? Hmmm…. What the film shows so well, to the
shame of psychiatrists, is that every delirium is first of all the investment of a field
that is social, economic, political cultural, racial and racist, pedagogical, and
religious: the delirious person applies a delirium to his family and his son that
overreaches them on all sides.19
I am not myself sure that the objective consequences of this essentially social
and concrete gap, in first-world experience, between the public and the private can
be abolished by intellectual diagnosis or by some more adequate theory of their
deeper interrelationship. Rather, it seems to me that what Deleuze and Guattari
are proposing here is a new and more adequate allegorical reading of this film.
Such allegorical structures, then, are not so much absent from first-world cultural
texts as they are unconscious, and therefore they must be deciphered by interpre-
tive mechanisms that necessarily entail a whole social and historical critique of our
current first-world situation. The point here is that, in distinction to the uncon-
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scious allegories of our own cultural texts, third-world national allegories are
conscious and overt: they imply a radically different and objective relationship of
politics to libidinal dynamics.
* * *
Now, before turning to the African texts, I remind you of the very special occasion
of the present talk, which is concerned to honor the memory of Robert C. Elliott
and to commemorate his life’s work. I take it that the very center of his two most
important books, The Power of Satire and The Shape of Utopia,20 is to be found in
his pathbreaking association of satire and the utopian impulse as two seemingly
antithetical drives (and literary discourses), which in reality replicate each other
such that each is always secretly active within the other’s sphere of influence. All
satire, he taught us, necessarily carries a utopian frame of reference within itself;
all utopias, no matter how serene or disembodied, are driven secretly by the
satirist’s rage at a fallen reality. When I spoke of futurity a moment ago, I took
pains to withhold the world “utopia,” which in my language is another word for
the socialist project.
But now I will be more explicit and take as my motto an astonishing passage
from the novel Xala, by the great contemporary Senegalese novelist and film-
maker Ousmane Sembene. The title designates a ritual curse or affliction, of a very
special kind, which has been visited on a prosperous and corrupt Senegalese
businessman at the moment in which, at the height of his fortune, he takes to
himself a beautiful young (third) wife. Shades of The Power of Satire!, the curse is
of course, as you may have guessed, sexual impotence. The Hadj, the unfortunate
hero of this novel, desperately explores a number of remedies, both western and
tribal, to no avail, and is finally persuaded to undertake a laborious trip into the
hinterland of Dakar to seek out a shaman of reputedly extraordinary powers. Here
is the conclusion of his hot and dusty journey in a horse-drawn cart:
As they emerged from a ravine, they saw conical thatched roofs, grey-black with
weathering, standing out against the horizon in the middle of the empty plain.
Free-ranging, skinny cattle with dangerous-looking horns fenced with one
another to get at what little grass there was. No more than silhouettes in the
distance, a few people were busy around the only well. The driver of the cart was
in familiar territory and greeted people as they passed. Sereen Mada’s house,
apart from its imposing size, was identical in construction with all the others. It
was situated in the center of the village whose huts were arranged in a semi-circle,
which you entered by a single main entrance. The village had neither shop nor
school nor dispensary; there was nothing at all attractive about it in fact [Ous-
mane concludes, then he adds, as if in afterthought, this searing line:] There was
nothing at all attractive about it in fact. Its life was based on the principles of
community interdependence.21
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Here, then, more emblematically than virtually any other text I know, the space of
a past and future utopia-a social world of collective cooperation-is dramati-
cally inserted into the corrupt and westernized money economy of the new post-
independence national or comprador bourgeoisie. Indeed, Ousmane takes pains to
show us that the Hadj is not an industrialist, that his business is in no sense
productive, but functions as a middle-man between European multinationals and
local extraction industries. To this biographical sketch must be added a very
significant fact: that in his youth, the Hadj was political, and spent some time in
jail for his nationalist and pro-independence activities. The extraordinary satire of
these corrupt classes (which Ousmane will extend to the person of Senghor him-
self in The Last of the Empire) is explicitly marked as the failure of the indepen-
dence movement to develop into a general social revolution.
The fact of nominal national independence, in Latin America in the 19th
century, in Africa in the mid-20th, puts an end to a movement for which genuine
national autonomy was the only conceivable goal. Nor is this symbolic myopia the
only problem: the African states also had to face the crippling effects of what
Fanon prophetically warned them against-to receive independence is not the
same as to take it, since it is in the revolutionary struggle itself that new social
relationships and a new consciousness is developed. Here again the history of
Cuba is instructive: Cuba was the last of the Latin American nations to win its
freedom in the 19th century-a freedom which would immediately be taken in
charge by another greater colonial power. We now know the incalculable role
played in the Cuban Revolution of 1959 by the protracted guerrilla struggles of the
late 19th century (of which the figure of Jose Marti is the emblem); contemporary
Cuba would not be the same without that laborious and subterranean, one wants
to say Thompsonian, experience of the mole of History burrowing through a
lengthy past and creating its specific traditions in the process.
So it is that after the poisoned gift of independence, radical African writers
like Ousmane, or like Ngugi in Kenya, find themselves back in the dilemma of Lu
Xun, bearing a passion for change and social regeneration which has not yet found
its agents. I hope it is clear that this is also very much an aesthetic dilemma, a crisis
of representation: it was not difficult to identify an adversary who spoke another
language and wore the visible trappings of colonial occupation. When those are
replaced by your own people, the connections to external controlling forces are
much more difficult to represent. The newer leaders may of course throw off their
masks and reveal the person of the Dictator, whether in its older individual or
newer military form: but this moment also determines problems of representation.
The dictator novel has become a virtual genre of Latin American literature, and
such works are marked above all by a profound and uneasy ambivalence, a deeper
ultimate sympathy for the Dictator, which can perhaps only be properly accounted
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Fredric Jameson
for by some enlarged social variant of the Freudian mechanism of transference.22
The form normally taken by a radical diagnosis of the failures of contempor-
ary third-world societies is, however, what is conventionally designated as “cul-
tural imperialism,” a faceless influence without representable agents, whose liter-
ary expression seems to demand the invention of new forms: Manuel Puig’s Be-
trayed by Rita Hayworth may be cited as one of the most striking and innovative of
those. One is led to conclude that under these circumstances traditional realism is
less effective than the satiric fable: whence to my mind the greater power of certain
of Ousmane’s narratives (besides Xala, we should mention The Money-Order) as
over against Ngugi’s impressive but problematical Petals of Blood.
With the fable, however, we are clearly back into the whole question of
allegory. The Money-Order mobilizes the traditional Catch-22 dilemma-its hap-
less protagonist cannot cash his Parisian check without identity papers, but since
he was born long before independence there are no documents, and meanwhile the
money-order, uncashed, begins to melt away before an accumulation of new cre-
dits and new debts. I am tempted to suggest, anachronistically, that this work,
published in 1965, prophetically dramatizes the greatest misfortune that can hap-
pen to a third-world country in our time, namely the discovery of vast amounts of
oil resources-something which as economists have shown us, far from represent-
ing salvation, at once sinks them incalculably into foreign debts they can never
dream of liquidating.
On another level, however, this tale raises the issue of what must finally be one
of the key problems in any analysis of Ousmane’s work, namely the ambiguous
role played in it by archaic or tribal elements. Viewers may perhaps remember the
curious ending of his first film, The Black Girl, in which the European employer is
inconclusively pursued by the little boy wearing an archaic mask; meanwhile such
historical films as Ceddo or Emitai seem intent on evoking older moments of tribal
resistance either to Islam or to the west, yet in a historical perspective which with
few exceptions is that of failure and ultimate defeat. Ousmane cannot, however, be
suspected of any archaizing or nostalgic cultural nationalism. Thus it becomes
important to determine the significance of this appeal to older tribal values, par-
ticularly as they are more subtly active in modern works like Xala or The
Money-Order.
I suspect that the deeper subject of this second novel is not so much the
evident one of the denunciation of a modern national bureaucracy, but rather the
historical transformation of the traditional Islamic value of alms-giving in a con-
temporary money economy. A Muslim has the duty to give alms-indeed, the
work concludes with just such another unfulfilled request. Yet in a modern
economy, this sacred duty to the poor is transformed into a frenzied assault by
free-loaders from all the levels of society (at length, the cash is appropriated by a
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westernized and affluent, influential cousin). The hero is literally picked clean by
the vultures; better still, the unsought for, unexpected treasure fallen from heaven
at once transforms the entire society around him into ferocious and insatiable
petitioners, in something like a monetary version of Lu Xun’s cannibalism.
The same double historical perspective-archaic customs radically trans-
formed and denatured by the superposition of capitalist relations-seems to me
demonstrable in Xala as well, in the often hilarious results of the more ancient
Islamic and tribal institution of polygamy. This is what Ousmane has to say about
that institution (it being understood that authorial intervention, no longer tolera-
ble in realistic narrative, is still perfectly suitable to the allegorical fable as a form):
It is worth knowing something about the life led by urban polygamists. It could
be called geographical polygamy, as opposed to rural polygamy, where all the
wives and children live together in the same compound. In the town, since the
families are scattered, the children have little contact with their father. Because of
his way of life the father must go from house to house, villa to villa, and is only
there in the evenings, at bedtime. He is therefore primarily a source of finance,
when he has work.23
Indeed, we are treated to the vivid spectacle of the Hadj’s misery when, at the
moment of his third marriage, which should secure his social status, he realizes he
has no real home of his own and is condemned to shuttle from one wife’s villa to
the other, in a situation in which he suspects each of them in turn as being
responsible for his ritual affliction. But the passage I have just read shows that-
whatever one would wish to think about polygamy in and of itself as an
institution-it functions here as a twin-valenced element designed to open up
historical perspective. The more and more frenzied trips of the Hadj through the
great city secure a juxtaposition between capitalism and the older collective tribal
form of social life.
These are not as yet, however, the most remarkable feature of Xala, which can
be described as a stunning and controlled, virtually text-book exercise in what I
have elsewhere called “generic discontinuities.”24 The novel begins, in effect, in
one generic convention, in terms of which the Hadj is read as a comic victim.
Everything goes wrong all at once, and the news of his disability suddenly triggers
a greater misfortune: his numerous debtors begin to descend on someone whose
bad luck clearly marks him out as a loser. A comic pity and terror accompanies
this process, though it does not imply any great sympathy for the personage.
Indeed it conveys a greater revulsion against the privileged new westernized society
in which this rapid overturning of the wheel of fortune can take place. Yet we have
all been in error, as it turns out: the wives have not been the source of the ritual
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Fredric Jameson
curse. In an abrupt generic reversal and enlargement (comparable to some of the
mechanisms Freud describes in “The Uncanny”), we suddenly learn something
new and chilling about the Hadj’s past:
“Out story goes back a long way. It was shortly before your marriage to that
woman there. Don’t you remember? I was sure you would not. What I am now”
(a beggar in rags is addressing him) “what I am now is your fault. Do you
remember selling a large piece of land at Jeko belonging to our clan? After
falsifying the clan names with the complicity of people in high places, you took
our land from us. In spite of our protests, our proof of ownership, we lost our
case in the courts. Not satisfied with taking our land you had me thrown into
prison.”25
Thus the primordial crime of capitalism is exposed: not so much wage labor
as such, or the ravages of the money form, or the remorseless and impersonal
rhythms of the market, but rather this primal displacement of the older forms of
collective life from a land now seized and privatized. It is the oldest of modern
tragedies, visited on the Native Americans yesterday, on the Palestinians today,
and significantly reintroduced by Ousmane into his film version of The Money-
Order (called Mandabi), in which the protagonist is now threatened with the
imminent loss of his dwelling itself.
The point I want to make about this terrible “return of the repressed,” is that
it determines a remarkable generic transformation of the narrative: suddenly we
are no longer in satire, but in ritual. The beggars and the lumpens, led by Sereen
Mada himself, descend on the Hadj and require him to submit, for the removal of
his xala, to an abominable ceremony of ritual humiliation and abasement. The
representational space of the narrative is lifted to a new generic realm, which
reaches back to touch the powers of the archaic even as it foretells the utopian
destruction of the fallen present in the mode of prophecy. The word “Brechtian,”
which inevitably springs to mind, probably does inadequate justice to these new
forms which have emerged from a properly third-world reality. Yet in light of this
unexpected generic ending, the preceding satiric text is itself retroactively trans-
formed. From a satire whose subject-matter or content was the ritual curse visited
on a character within the narrative, it suddenly becomes revealed as a ritual curse
in its own right-the entire imagined chain of events becomes Ousmane’s own
curse upon his hero and people like him. No more stunning confirmation could be
adduced for Robert C. Elliott’s great insight into the anthropological origins of
satiric discourse in real acts of shamanistic malediction.
I want to conclude with a few thoughts on why all this should be so and on
the origins and status of what I have identified as the primacy of national allegory
in third-world culture. We are, after all, familiar with the mechanisms of auto-
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referentiality in contemporary western literature: is this not simply to be taken as
another form of that, in a structurally distinct social and cultural context?
Perhaps. But in that case our priorities must be reversed for proper understanding
of this mechanism. Consider the disrepute of social allegory in our culture and the
well-nigh inescapable operation of social allegory in the west’s Other. These two
contrasting realities are to be grasped, I think, in terms of situational conscious-
ness, an expression I prefer to the more common term materialism. Hegel’s old
analysis of the Master-Slave relationship26 may still be the most effective way of
dramatizing this distinction between two cultural logics. Two equals struggle each
for recognition by the other: the one is willing to sacrifice life for this supreme
value. The other, a heroic coward in the Brechtian, Schweykian sense of loving the
body and the material world too well, gives in, in order to continue life. The
Master-now the fulfillment of a baleful and inhuman feudal-aristocratic disdain
for life without honor-proceeds to enjoy the benefits of his recognition by the
other, now become his humble serf or slave. But at this point two distinct and
dialectically ironic reversals take place: only the Master is now genuinely human,
so that “recognition” by this henceforth sub-human form of life which is the slave
evaporates at the moment of its attainment and offers no genuine satisfaction.
“The truth of the Master,” Hegel observes grimly, “is the Slave; while the truth of
the Slave, on the other hand, is the Master.” But a second reversal is in process as
well: for the slave is called upon to labor for the master and to furnish him with all
the material benefits befitting his supremacy. But this means that, in the end, only
the slave knows what reality and the resistance of matter really are; only the slave
can attain some true materialistic consciousness of his situation, since it is pre-
cisely to that that he is condemned. The Master, however, is condemned to
idealism-to the luxury of a placeless freedom in which any consciousness of his
own concrete situation flees like a dream, like a word unremembered on the tip of
the tongue, a nagging doubt which the puzzled mind is unable to formulate.
It strikes me that we Americans, we masters of the world, are in something of
that very same position. The view from the top is epistemologically crippling, and
reduces its subjects to the illusions of a host of fragmented subjectivities, to the
poverty of the individual experience of isolated monads, to dying individual bodies
without collective pasts or futures bereft of any possibility of grasping the social
totality. This placeless individuality, this structural idealism which affords us the
luxury of the Sartrean blink, offers a welcome escape from the “nightmare of
history,” but at the same time it condemns our culture to psychologism and the
“projections” of private subjectivity. All of this is denied to third-world culture,
which must be situational and materialist despite itself. And it is this, finally,
which must account for the allegorical nature of third-world culture, where the
telling of the individual story and the individual experience cannot but ultimately
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involve the whole laborious telling of the experience of the collectivity itself.
I hope I have suggested the epistemological priority of this unfamiliar kind of
allegorical vision; but I must admit that old habits die hard, and that for us such
unaccustomed exposure to reality, or to the collective totality, is often intolerable,
leaving us in Quentin’s position at the end of Absalom, Absalom!, murmuring the
great denial, “I don’t hate the Third World! I don’t! I don’t! I don’t!”
Even that resistance is instructive, however; and we may well feel, confronted
with the daily reality of the other two-thirds of the globe, that “there was nothing
at all attractive about it in fact.” But we must not allow ourselves that feeling
without also acknowledging its ultimate mocking completion: “Its life was based
on the principles of community interdependence.”
NOTES
1. The whole matter of nationalism should perhaps be rethought, as Benedict Anderson’s interest-
ing essay Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983), and Tom Nairn’s The Breakup of Britain
(London: New Left Books, 1977) invite us to do.
2. I have argued elsewhere for the importance of mass culture and science fiction. See “Reification
and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text no. 1 (1979), 130-148.
3. The essay was written for an immediate occasion-the third memorial lecture in honor of my
late colleague and friend Robert C. Elliot at the University of California, San Diego. It is essentially
reprinted as given.
4. William Bennett, “To Reclaim a Legacy,” Text of a report on the Humanities, Chronicle of
Higher Education, XXIX, 14 (Nov. 28, 1984), pp. 16-21.
5. The classic texts are F. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884)
and the earlier, but only more recently published section of Marx’s Grundrisse, often called “Pre-
capitalist economic formations,” trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: NLB/Penguin, 1973), pp. 471-514.
See also Emmanuel Terray, Marxism and “Primitive” Societies, trans. M. Klopper, (New York:
Monthly Review, 1972); Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst, Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975); and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “Savages, Barbarians,
Civilized Men,” in Anti-Oedipus, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem, H.R. Lane, (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota press, 1983), pp. 139-271.
Besides mode-of-production theory, whose validity is in any case widely debated, there have also
appeared in recent years a number of important synthesizing works on third-world history as a unified
field. Three works in particular deserve mention: Global Rift, by L.S. Stavrianos (Morrow, 1981);
Europe and the People without History, by Eric R. Wolf (California, 1982), and The Three Worlds, by
Peter Worsley (Chicago, 1984). Such works suggest a more general methodological consequence im-
plicit in the present essay but which should be stated explicitly here: first, that the kind of comparative
work demanded by this concept of third-world literature involves comparison, not of the individual
texts, which are formally and culturally very different from each other, but of the concrete situations
from which such texts spring and to which they constitute distinct responses; and second, that such an
approach suggests the possibility of a literary and cultural comparatism of a new type, distantly
modelled on the new comparative history of Barrington Moore and exemplified in books like Theda
Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions or Eric Wolf’s Peasant Revolutions of the 20th Century. Such a
86
Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism
new cultural comparatism would juxtapose the study of the differences and similarities of specific
literary and cultural texts with a more typological analysis of the various socio-cultural situations from
which they spring, an analysis whose variables would necessarily include such features as the inter-
relationship of social classes, the role of intellectuals, the dynamics of language and writing, the
configuration of traditional forms, the relationship to western influences, the development of urban
experience and money, and so forth. Such comparatism, however, need not be restricted to third-world
literature.
6. See for example, Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: New Left Books,
1974), pp. 435-549.
7. Sigmund Freud, “Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of
Paranoia,” trans. James Strachey, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth, 1958), Volume XII, p. 457.
8. See for example Wolfram Eberhard, A History of China, trans. E.W. Dickes, (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1977), p. 105: “When we hear of alchemy, or read books about it we should
always keep in mind that many of these books can also be read as books of sex; in a similar way, books
on the art of war, too, can be read as books on sexual relations.”
9. Lu Xun, Selected Stories of Lu Hsun, trans. Gladys Yang and Yang Hsien-yi (Beijing: Foreign
Languages Press, 1972), pp. 1-6.
10. Ibid., pp. 2-3.
11. Ibid., p. 40.
12. Ibid., p. 72.
13. Ibid. I am indebted to Peter Rushton for some of these observations.
14. Ibid., p. 5.
15. Socialism will become a reality, Lenin observes, “when the necessity of observing the simple,
fundamental rules of human intercourse” has “become a habit.” (State and Revolution [Beijing:
Foreign Languages Press, 1973], p. 122.)
16. See the interesting discussions in Stephen Gilman, Gald6s and the Art of the European Novel:
1867-18
87
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).
17. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System (New York: Academic Press, 1974).
18. For example: “El Delfin habia entrado, desde los dltimos dias del 74, en aquel periodo
sedante que seguia infaliblemente a sus desvarios. En realidad, no era aquello virtud, sino casancio del
pecado; no era el sentimiento puro y regular del orden, sino el hastio de la revoluci6n. Verificibase en el
lo que don Baldomero habia dicho del pais: que padecia fiebres alternativas de libertad y de paz.”
Fortunata y Jacinta (Madrid: Editorial Hernando, 1968), p. 585 (Part III, chapter 2, section 2).
19. Deluze and Guattari, op. cit., p. 274.
20. Princeton University Press, 1960; and University of Chicago Press, 1970, respectively.
21. Sembene Ousmane, Xala, trans. Clive Wake, (Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill, 1976), p. 69.
22. I am indebted to Carlos Blanco Aguinaga for the suggestion that in the Latin American novel
this ambivalence may be accounted for by the fact that the archetypal Dictator, while oppressing his
own people, is also perceived as resisting North American influence.
23. Xala, op. cit., p. 66.
24. “Generic Discontinuities in Science Fiction: Brian Aldiss’ Starship,” Science Fiction Studies
#2 (1973), pp. 57-68.
25. Xala, op. cit., pp. 110-111.
26. G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. A.V. Miller, (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1977): Section B, Chapter IV, Part A-3, “Lordship and Bondage,” pp. 111-119. The other basic
philosophical underpinning of this argument is Lukacs’ epistemology in History and Class Conscious-
87
Fredric Jameson
ness according to which “mapping” or the grasping of the social totality is structurally available to the
dominated rather than the dominating classes. “Mapping” is a term I have used in “Postmodernism, or,
the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” (New Left Review #146 [July-August, 1984], pp. 53-92).
What is here called “national allegory” is clearly a form of just such mapping of the totality, so that the
present essay-which sketches a theory of the cognitive aesthetics of third-world literature-forms a
pendant to the essay on postmodernism which describes the logic of the cultural imperalism of the first
world and above all of the United States.
New Political Science
Summer 1986 No. 15
Literature and Politics
J. Derrida
“On the Declaration of Independence”
M. Blanchot
“Marx’s Three Voices”
Plus
J. Arac, “Mathiessen and the American
Renaissance.”
D. Sommer, “Whitman and the Liberal Self.”
C. Kay, ‘Wollstonecraft’s Critique of Adam
Smith.”
T. Norton, “Deleuze and Political Science
Fiction.”
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Social Text, No. 15 (Autumn, 1986), pp. i-xii+1-144
Front Matter [pp. i – i]
Introduction [pp. iii – xii]
Special Section on Cuba
Our America and the West [pp. 1 – 25]
La Vida Real [pp. 26 – 31]
Women and Poetry in Cuba [pp. 32 – 40]
Interviews with Cuban Artists [pp. 41 – 53]
Bad Taste in Good Form [pp. 54 – 64]
Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism [pp. 65 – 88]
Aesthetics and Foreign Policy [pp. 89 – 98]
Soviet-Cuban Involvement in Central America: A Critique of Recent Writings [pp. 99 – 125]
Marxism and Post-Marxism [pp. 126 – 135]
Unequal Developments
Maximum Security [pp. 136 – 139]
Forgetting Baudrillard [pp. 140 – 144]
Back Matter
Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the “National Allegory”
Author(s): Aijaz Ahmad
Source: Social Text, No. 1
7
(Autumn, 1987), pp. 3-25
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Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the
“National Allegory”
AIJAZ AHMAD
In assembling the following notes on Fredric Jameson’s “Third-World Literature
in the Era of Multinational Capital,”:’ I find myself in an awkward position. If I were
to name the one literary critic/theorist writing in the US today whose work I generally
hold in the highest regard, it would surely be Fredric Jameson. The plea that gener-
ates most of the passion in his text-that the teaching of literature in the US academy
be informed by a sense not only of “western” literature but of “world literature”; that
the so-called literary canon be based not upon the exclusionary pleasures of domin-
ant taste but upon an inclusive and opulent sense of heterogeneity-is of course
entirely salutary. And, I wholly admire the knowledge, the range of sympathies, he
brings to the reading of texts produced in distant lands.
Yet this plea for syllabus reform-even his marvelously erudite reading of Lu
Xun and Ousmane-is conflated with, indeed superseded by, a much more ambitious
undertaking which pervades the entire text but which is explicitly announced only in
the last sentence of the last footnote: the construction of “a theory of the cognitive
aesthetics of third-world literature.” This “cognitive aesthetics” rests, in turn, upon a
suppression of the multiplicity of significant difference among and within both the
advanced capitalist countries and the imperialised formations. We have, instead, a
binary opposition of what Jameson calls the “first” and the “third” worlds. It is in
this passage from a plea for syllabus reform to the enunciation of a “cognitive
aesthetics” that most of the text’s troubles lie. These troubles are, I might add, quite
numerous.
There is doubtless a personal, somewhat existential side to my encounter with
this text, which is best clarified at the outset. I have been reading Jameson’s work now
for roughly fifteen years, and at least some of what I know about the literatures and
cultures of Western Europe and the US comes from him; and because I am a marxist,
I
had always thought of us, Jameson and myself, as birds of the same feather even
though we never quite flocked together. But, then, when I was on the fifth page of this
text (specifically, on the sentence starting with “All third-world texts are necessar-
ily. . .” etc.), I realized that what was being theorised was, among many other things,
‘Social Text #
15
(Fall 1986), pp. 65-88.
3
Aijaz Ahmad
myself. Now, I was born in India and I am a Pakistani citizen; I write poetry in Urdu,
a language not commonly understood among US intellectuals. So, I said to myself:
“All? . . . necessarily ?” It felt odd. Matters got much more curious, however. For, the
farther I read the more I realized, with no little chagrin, that the man whom I had for
so long, so affectionately, even though from a physical distance, taken as a comrade
was, in his own opinion, my civilizational Other. It was not a good feeling.
I
I too think that there are plenty of very good books written by African, Asian
and Latin American writers which are available in English and which must be taught
as an antidote against the general ethnocentricity and cultural myopia of the
humanities as they are presently constituted in these United States. If some label is
needed for this activity, one may call it “third-world literature.” Conversely, however,
I also hold that this phrase, “the third world,” is, even in its most telling deployments,
a polemical one, with no theoretical status whatsoever. Polemic surely has a promi-
nent place in all human discourses, especially in the discourse of politics, so the use of
this phrase in loose, polemical contexts is altogether permissible. But to lift the phrase
from the register of polemics and claim it as a basis for producing theoretical knowl-
edge, which presumes a certain rigor in constructing the objects of one’s knowledge,
is to misconstrue not only the phrase itself but even the world to which it refers. I
shall argue, therefore, that there is no such thing as a “third-world literature” which
can be constructed as an internally coherent object of theoretical knowledge. There
are fundamental issues-of periodisation, social and linguistic formations, political
and ideological struggles within the field of literary production, and so on-which
simply cannot be resolved at this level of generality without an altogether positivist
reductionism.
The mere fact, for example, that languages of the metropolitan countries have
not been adopted by the vast majority of the producers of literature in Asia and Africa
means that the vast majority of literary texts from those continents are unavailable in
the metropoles, so that a literary theorist who sets out to formulate “a theory of the
cognitive aesthetics of third-world literature” shall be constructing ideal-types, in the
Weberian manner, duplicating all the basic procedures which orientalist scholars
have historically deployed in presenting their own readings of a certain tradition of
“high” textuality as the knowledge of a supposedly unitary object which they call
“the Islamic civilization.” I might add that literary relations between the metropoli-
tan countries and the imperialised formations are constructed very differently than
they are among the metropolitan countries themselves. Rare would be a literary
theorist in Europe or the US who does not command a couple of European languages
other than his/her own; and the frequency of translation, back and forth, among
4
Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the “National Allegory”
European languages creates very fulsome circuits for the circulation of texts, so that
even a US scholar who does not command much beyond English can be quite well
grounded in the various metropolitan traditions.
Linguistic and literary relations between the metropolitan countries and the
countries of Asia and Africa, on the other hand, offer three sharp contrasts to this
system. Rare would be a modern intellectual in Asia or Africa who does not know at
least one European language; equally rare would be, on the other side, a major
literary theorist in Europe or the United States who has ever bothered with an Asian
or African language; and the enormous industry of translation which circulates texts
among the advanced capitalist countries comes to the most erratic and slowest possi-
ble grind when it comes to translation from Asian or African languages. The upshot
is that major literary traditions-such as those of Bengali, Hindi, Tamil, Telegu and
half a dozen others from India alone-remain, beyond a few texts here and there,
virtually unknown to the American literary theorist. Consequently, the few writers
who happen to write in English are valorized beyond measure. Witness, for example,
the characterization of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children in the New York Times
as “a Continent finding its voice”-as if one has no voice if one does not speak in
English. Or, Richard Poirier’s praise for Edward Said in Raritan Quarterly which
now adorns the back cover of his latest book: “It is Said’s great accomplishment that
thanks to his book, Palestinians will never be lost to history.” This is the upside-down
world of the camera obscura: not that Said’s vision is itself framed by the Palestinian
experience but that Palestine would have no place in history without Said’s book! The
retribution visited upon the head of an Asian, an African, an Arab intellectual who is
of any consequence and who writes in English is that he/she is immediately elevated
to the lonely splendour of a “representative”-of a race, a continent, a civilization,
even the “third world.” It is in this general context that a “cognitive theory of
third-world literature” based upon what is currently available in languages of the
metropolitan countries becomes, to my mind, an alarming undertaking.
I shall return to some of these points presently, especially to the point about the
epistemological impossibility of a “third-world literature.” Since, however, Jameson’s
own text is so centrally grounded in a binary opposition between a first and a third
world, it is impossible to proceed with an examination of his particular propositions
regarding the respective literary traditions without first asking whether or not this
characterization of the world is itself theoretically tenable, and whether, therefore, an
accurate conception of literature can be mapped out on the basis of this binary
opposition. I shall argue later that since Jameson defines the so-called third world in
terms of its “experience of colonialism and imperialism,” the political category that
necessarily follows from this exclusive emphasis is that of “the nation,” with
nationalism as the peculiarly valorized ideology; and, because of this privileging of
the nationalist ideology, it is then theoretically posited that “all third-world texts are
5
Aijaz Ahmad
necessarily … to be read as … national allegories.” The theory of the “national
allegory” as the metatext is thus inseparable from the larger Three Worlds Theory
which permeates the whole of Jameson’s own text. We too have to begin, then, with
some comments on “the third world” as a theoretical category and on “nationalism”
as the necessary, exclusively desirable ideology.
II
Jameson seems aware of the difficulties in conceptualising the global dispersion
of powers and populations in terms of his particular variant of the Three Worlds
Theory (“I take the point of criticism,” he says). And, after reiterating the basic
premise of that theory (“the capitalist first world”; “the socialist bloc of the second
world”; and “countries that have suffered colonialism and imperialism”), he does
clarify that he does not uphold the specifically Maoist theory of “convergence”
between the United States and the Soviet Union. The rest of the difficulty in holding
this view of the world is elided, however, with three assertions: that he cannot find a
“comparable expression”; that he is deploying these terms in “an essentially descrip-
tive way”; and that the criticisms are at any rate not “relevant.” The problem of
“comparable expression” is a minor matter, which we shall ignore; “relevance,” on
the other hand, is the central issue and I shall deal with it presently. First, however, I
want to comment briefly on the matter of “description.”
More than most critics writing in the US today, Jameson should know that when
it comes to a knowledge of the world, there is no such thing as a category of the
“essentially descriptive”; that “description” is never ideologically or cognitively neu-
tral; that to “describe” is to specify a locus of meaning, to construct an object of
knowledge, and to produce a knowledge that shall be bound by that act of descriptive
construction. “Description” has been central, for example, in the colonial discourse.
It was by assembling a monstrous machinery of descriptions-of our bodies, our
speech-acts, our habitats, our conflicts and desires, our politics, our socialities and
sexualities-in fields as various as ethnology, fiction, photography, linguistics, politi-
cal science-that the colonial discourse was able to classify and ideologically master
the colonial subject, enabling itself to transform the descriptively verifiable multiplic-
ity and difference into the ideologically felt hierarchy of value. To say, in short, that
what one is presenting is “essentially descriptive” is to assert a level of facticity which
conceals its own ideology and to prepare a ground from which judgments of classifi-
cation, generalisation and value can be made.
As we get to the substance of what Jameson “describes,” I find it significant that
first and second worlds are defined in terms of their production systems (capitalism
and socialism, respectively), whereas the third category-the third world-is defined
purely in terms of an “experience” of externally inserted phenomena. That which is
6
Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the “National Allegory”
constitutive of human history itself is present in the first two cases, absent in the third
one. Ideologically, this classification divides the world between those who make
history and those who are mere objects of it; elsewhere in the text, Jameson would
significantly re-invoke Hegel’s famous description of the master/slave relation to
encapsulate the first/third world opposition. But analytically, this classification leaves
the so-called third world in a limbo; if only the first world is capitalist and the second
world socialist, how does one understand the third world? Is it pre-capitalist? Transi-
tional? Transitional between what and what?
But then there is also the issue of the location of particular countries within the
various “worlds.” Take, for example, India. Its colonial past is nostalgically rehashed
on US television screens in copious series every few months, but the India of today has
all the characteristics of a capitalist country: generalised commodity production,
vigorous and escalating exchanges not only between agriculture and industry but also
between Departments I and II of industry itself, technical personnel more numerous
than that of France and Germany combined, and a gross industrial product twice as
large as that of Britain. It is a very miserable kind of capitalism, and the conditions of
life for over half of the Indian population (roughly 400 million people) are considera-
bly worse than what Engels described in Conditions of the Working Class in England.
But India’s steel industry did celebrate its hundredth anniversary a few years ago, and
the top eight of her multinational corporations are among the fastest growing in the
world, active as they are in numerous countries, from Vietnam to Nigeria. This
economic base is combined, then, with unbroken parliamentary rule of the
bourgeoisie since independence in 1947, a record quite comparable to the length of
Italy’s modern record of unbroken bourgeois-democratic governance, and superior to
the fate of bourgeois democracy in Spain and Portugal, two of the oldest colonising
countries. This parliamentary republic of the bourgeoisie in India has not been
without its own lawlessnesses and violences, of a kind and degree now not normal in
Japan or Western Europe, but a bourgeois political subjectivity has been created for
the populace at large. The corollary on the left is that the two communist parties (CPI
and CPM) have longer and more extensive experience of regional government, within
the republic of the bourgeoisie, than all the eurocommunist parties combined, and the
electorate that votes ritually for these two parties is probably larger than the com-
munist electorates in all the rest of the capitalist world.
So, does India belong in the first world or the third? Brazil, Argentina, Mexico,
South Africa? And .. .? But we know that countries of the Pacific rim, from South
Korea to Singapore, constitute the fastest growing region within global capitalism.
The list could be much longer, but the point is that the binary opposition which
Jameson constructs between a capitalist first world and a presumably pre- or non-
capitalist third world is empirically ungrounded.
7
Aijaz Ahmad
III
I have said already that if one believes in the Three Worlds Theory, hence in a
“third world” defined exclusively in terms of “the experience of colonialism and
imperialism,” then the primary ideological formation available to a leftwing intellec-
tual shall be that of nationalism; it will then be possible to assert, surely with very
considerable exaggeration but nonetheless, that “all third-world texts are necessarily
… national allegories” (emphases in the original). This exclusive emphasis on the
nationalist ideology is there even in the opening paragraph of Jameson’s text where
the only choice for the “third world” is said to be between its “nationalisms” and a
“global American postmodernist culture.” Is there no other choice? Could not one
join the “second world,” for example? There used to be, in the marxist discourse, a
thing called socialist and/or communist culture which was neither nationalist nor
postmodernist. Has that vanished from our discourse altogether, even as the name of
a desire?
Jameson’s haste in totalising historical phenomena in terms of binary opposi-
tions (nationalism/postmodernism, in this case) leaves little room for the fact, for
instance, that the only nationalisms in the so-called third world which have been able
to resist US cultural pressure and have actually produced any alternatives are the ones
which are already articulated to and assimilated within the much larger field of
socialist political practice. Virtually all others have had no difficulty in reconciling
themselves with what Jameson calls “global American postmodernist culture”; in the
singular and sizeable case of Iran (which Jameson forbids us to mention on the
grounds that it is “predictable” that we shall do so), the anti-communism of the
Islamic nationalists has produced not social regeneration but clerical fascism. Nor
does the absolutism of that opposition (postmodernism/nationalism) permit any
space for the simple idea that nationalism itself is not some unitary thing with some
pre-determined essence and value. There are hundreds of nationalisms in Asia and
Africa today; some are progressive, others are not. Whether or not a nationalism will
produce a progressive cultural practice depends, to put it in Gramscian terms, upon
the political character of the power bloc which takes hold of it and utilises it, as a
material force, in the process of constituting its own hegemony. There is neither
theoretical ground nor empirical evidence to support the notion that bourgeois
nationalisms of the so-called third world will have any difficulty with postmodern-
ism; they want it.
Yet, there is a very tight fit between the Three Worlds Theory, the over-valoriza-
tion of the nationalist ideology, and the assertion that “national allegory” is the
primary, even exclusive, form of narrativity in the so-called third world. If this “third
world” is constituted by the singular “experience of colonialism and imperialism,”
and if the only possible response is a nationalist one, then what else is there that is
8
Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the “National Allegory”
more urgent to narrate than this “experience”; in fact, there is nothing else to
narrate. For, if societies here are defined not by relations of production but by
relations of intra-national domination; if they are forever suspended outside the
sphere of conflict between capitalism (first world) and socialism (second world); if the
motivating force for history here is neither class formation and class struggle nor the
multiplicities of intersecting conflicts based upon class, gender, nation, race, region
and so on, but the unitary “experience” of national oppression (if one is merely the
object of history, the Hegelian slave) then what else can one narrate but that national
oppression? Politically, we are Calibans, all. Formally, we are fated to be in the
poststructuralist world of repetition with difference; the same allegory, the nationalist
one, re-written, over and over again, until the end of time: “all third-world texts are
necessarily. . .”
I
V
But one could start with a radically different premise, namely the proposition
that we live not in three worlds but in one; that this world includes the experience of
colonialism and imperialism on both sides of Jameson’s global divide (the “experi-
ence” of imperialism is a central fact of all aspects of life inside the US from ideologi-
cal formation to the utilisation of the social surplus in military-industrial complexes);
that societies in formations of backward capitalism are as much constituted by the
division of classes as are societies in the advanced capitalist countries; that socialism
is not restricted to something called the second world but is simply the name of a
resistance that saturates the globe today, as capitalism itself does; that the different
parts of the capitalist system are to be known not in terms of a binary opposition but
as a contradictory unity, with differences, yes, but also with profound overlaps. One
immediate consequence for literary theory would be that the unitary search for “a
theory of cognitive aesthetics for third-world literature” would be rendered impossi-
ble, and one would have to forego the idea of a meta-narrative that encompasses all
the fecundity of real narratives in the so-called third world. Conversely, many of the
questions that one would ask about, let us say, Urdu or Bengali traditions of literature
may turn out to be rather similar to the questions one has asked previously about
English/American literatures. By the same token, a real knowledge of those other
traditions may force US literary theorists to ask questions about their own tradition
which they have heretofore not asked.
Jameson claims that one cannot proceed from the premise of a real unity of the
world “without falling back into some general liberal and humanistic universalism.”
That is a curious idea, coming from a marxist. One should have thought that the
world was united not by liberalist ideology-that the world was not at all constituted
in the realm of an Idea, be it Hegelian or humanist-but by the global operation of a
9
Aijaz Ahmad
single mode of production, namely the capitalist one, and the global resistance to this
mode, a resistance which is itself unevenly developed in different parts of the globe.
Socialism, one should have thought, was not by any means limited to the so-called
second world (the socialist countries) but a global phenomenon, reaching into the
farthest rural communities in Asia, Africa and Latin America, not to speak of indi-
viduals and groups within the United States. What gives the world its unity, then, is
not a humanist ideology but the ferocious struggle of capital and labor which is now
strictly and fundamentally global in character. The prospect of a socialist revolution
has receded so much from the practical horizon of so much of the metropolitan left
that the temptation for the US left intelligentsia is to forget the ferocity of that basic
struggle which in our time transcends all others. The advantage of coming from
Pakistan, in my own case, is that the country is saturated with capitalist com-
modities, bristles with US weaponry, borders on China, the Soviet Union and Af-
ghanistan, suffers from a proliferation of competing nationalisms, and is currently
witnessing the first stage in the consolidation of the communist movement. It is
difficult, coming from there, to forget that primary motion of history which gives to
our globe its contradictory unity: a notion that has nothing to do with liberal
humanism.
As for the specificity of cultural difference, Jameson’s theoretical conception
tends, I believe, in the opposite direction, namely, that of homogenisation. Difference
between the first world and the third is absolutised as an Otherness, but the enormous
cultural heterogeneity of social formations within the so-called third world is sub-
merged within a singular identity of “experience.” Now, countries of Western Europe
and North America have been deeply tied together over roughly the last two hundred
years; capitalism itself is so much older in these countries; the cultural logic of late
capitalism is so strongly operative in these metropolitan formations; the circulation of
cultural products among them is so immediate, so extensive, so brisk that one could
sensibly speak of a certain cultural homegeneity among them. But Asia, Africa, and
Latin America? Historically, these countries were never so closely tied together; Peru
and India simply do not have a common history of the sort that Germany and France,
or Britain and the United States, have; not even the singular “experience of colonial-
ism and imperialism” has been in specific ways same or similar in, say, India and
Namibia. These various countries, from the three continents, have been assimilated
into the global structure of capitalism not as a single cultural ensemble but highly
differentially, each establishing its own circuits of (unequal) exchange with the me-
tropolis, each acquiring its own very distinct class formations. Circuits of exchange
among them are rudimentary at best; an average Nigerian who is literate about his
own country would know infinitely more about England and the United States than
about any country of Asia or Latin America or indeed about most countries of Africa.
The kind of circuits that bind the cultural complexes of the advanced capitalist
10
Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the “National Allegory”
countries simply do not exist among countries of backward capitalism, and
capitalism itself, which is dominant but not altogether universalised, does not yet
have the same power of homogenisation in its cultural logic in most of these countries,
except among the urban bourgeoisie.
Of course, great cultural similarities also exist among countries that occupy
analogous positions in the global capitalist system, and there are similarities in many
cases that have been bequeathed by the similarities of socio-economic structures in
the pre-capitalist past. The point is not to construct a typology that is simply the
obverse of Jameson’s, but rather to define the material basis for a fair degree of
cultural homogenisation among the advanced capitalist countries and the lack of that
kind of homogenisation in the rest of the capitalist world. In context, therefore, one is
doubly surprised at Jameson’s absolute insistence upon difference and the relation of
otherness between the first world and the third, and his equally insistent idea that the
“experience” of the “third world” could be contained and communicated within a
single narrative form.
By locating capitalism in the first world and socialism in the second, Jameson’s
theory freezes and de-historicises the global space within which struggles between
these great motivating forces actually take place. And, by assimilating the enormous
heterogeneities and productivities of our life into a single Hegelian metaphor of the
master/slave relation, this theory reduces us to an ideal-type and demands from us
that we narrate ourselves through a form commensurate with that ideal-type. To say
that all third-world texts are necessarily this or that is to say, in effect, that any text
originating within that social space which is not this or that is not a “true” narrative.
It is in this sense above all, that the category of “third-world literature” which is the
site of this operation, with the “national allegory” as its metatext as well as the mark
of its constitution and difference, is, to my mind, epistemologically an impossible
category.
V
Part of the difficulty in engaging Jameson’s text is that there is a constant slip-
page, a recurrent inflation, in the way he handles the categories of his analysis. The
specificity of the first world, for example, seems at times to be predicated upon the
postmodernist moment, which is doubtless of recent origin, but at other times it
appears to be a matter of the capitalist mode of production, which is a much larger,
much older thing; and, in yet another range of formulations, this first world is said to
be coterminal with “western civilization” itself, obviously a rather primordial way of
being, dating back to antiquity (“Graeco-Judaic,” in Jameson’s phrase) and anterior
to any structuration of productions and classes as we know them today. When did
this first world become first, in the pre-Christian centuries, or after World War II?
11
Aijaz Ahmad
And, at what point in history does a text produced in countries with “experience
of colonialism and imperialism” become a third-world text? In one kind of reading,
only texts produced after the advent of colonialism could be so designated, since it is
colonialism/imperialism which constitutes the third world as such. But, in speaking
constantly of “the west’s other”; in referring to the tribal/tributary and the Asiatic
modes as the theoretical basis for his selection of Lu Xun (Asian) and Sembene
(African) respectively; in characterising Freud’s theory as a “western or first-world
reading” as contrasted with ten centuries of specifically Chinese distributions of the
libidinal energy which are said to frame Lu Xun’s texts-in deploying these broad
epochal and civilizational categories, Jameson suggests also that the difference be-
tween the first world and the third is itself primordial, rooted in things far older than
capitalism as such. If, then, the first world is the same as “the west” and the
“Graeco-Judaic,” one has an alarming feeling that the Bhagvad Geeta, the edicts of
Manu, and the Quran itself are perhaps third-world texts (though the Judaic elements
of the Quran are quite beyond doubt, and much of the ancient art in what is today
Pakistan is itself Graeco-Indic).
But there is also the question of space. Do all texts produced in countries with
“experience of colonialism and imperialism” become, by virtue of geographical ori-
gin, third-world texts? Jameson speaks so often of “all” third-world texts, insists so
much on a singular form of narrativity for third-world literature, that not to take him
literally is to violate the very terms of his discourse. Yet, one knows of so many texts
from one’s own part of the world which do not fit the description of “national
allegory” that one wonders why Jameson insists so much on the category “all.”
Without this category, of course, he cannot produce a theory of third-world litera-
ture. But is it also the case that he means the opposite of what he actually says: not
that “all third-world texts are to be read … as national allegories” but that only
those texts which give us national allegories can be admitted as authentic texts of
third-world literature, while the rest are excluded by definition? Hence, one is not
quite sure whether one is dealing with a fallacy (“all third-world texts are” this or
that) or with the Law of the Father (you must write this if you are to be admitted into
my theory).
These shifts and hesitations in defining the objects of one’s knowledge are based,
I believe, on several confusions, one of which I shall specify here. For, if one argues
that the third world is constituted by the “experience of colonialism and im-
perialism,” one must also recognise the two-pronged action of the colonial/imperialist
dynamic: the forced transfers of value from the colonialised/imperialised formations,
and the intensification of capitalist relations within those formations. And if
capitalism is not merely an externality but also a shaping force within those forma-
tions, then one must conclude also that the separation between the public and the
private, so characteristic of capitalism, has occurred there as well, at least in some
12
Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the “National Allegory”
degree and especially among the urban intelligentsia which produces most of the
written texts and which is itself caught in the world of capitalist commodities. With
this bifurcation must have come, at least for some of the producers of texts, the
individuation and personalisation of libidinal energies, the loss of access to “con-
crete” experience, and the consequent experience of self as isolated, alienated entity
incapable of real, organic connection with any collectivity. There must be texts,
perhaps numerous texts, that are grounded in this desolation, bereft of any capacity
for the kind of allegorisation and organicity that Jameson demands of them. The logic
of Jameson’s own argument (i.e., that the third world is constituted by “experience of
colonialism and imperialism”) leads necessarily to the conclusion that at least some of
the writers of the third world itself must be producing texts characteristic not of the
so-called tribal and Asiatic modes but of the capitalist era as such, much in the
manner of the so-called first world. But Jameson does not draw that conclusion.
He does not draw that conclusion at least partially because this so-called third
world is to him suspended outside the modern systems of production (capitalism and
socialism). He does not quite say that the third world is pre- or non-capitalist, but
that is clearly the implication of the contrast he establishes, as for example in the
following formulation:
… one of the determinants of capitalist culture, that is, the culture of the western
realist and modernist novel, is a radical split between the private and the public,
between the poetic and the political, between what we have come to think of as the
domain of sexuality and the unconscious and that of the public world of classes, of
the economic, and of secular political power: in other words, Freud versus
Marx ….
I will argue that, although we may retain for convenience and for analysis such
categories as the subjective and the public or political, the relations between them
are wholly different in third-world culture.
It is noteworthy that “the radical split between the private and the public” is
distinctly located in the capitalist mode here, but the absence of this split in so-called
third-world culture is not located in any mode of production-in keeping with
Jameson’s very definition of the Three Worlds. But Jameson knows what he is talking
about, and his statements have been less ambiguous in the past. Thus, we find the
following in his relatively early essay on Lukacs:
In the art works of a preindustrialized, agricultural or tribal society, the artist’s raw
material is on a human scale, it has an immediate meaning…. The story needs no
background in time because the culture knows no history; each generation repeats
the same experiences, reinvents the same basic human situations as though for the
first time …. The works of art characteristic of such societies may be called concrete
13
14 Aijaz Ahmad
in that their elements are all meaningful from the outset … in the language of
Hegel, this raw material needs no mediation.
When we turn from such a work to the literature of the industrial era, every-
thing changes … a kind of dissolution of the human sets in…. For the unques-
tioned ritualistic time of village life no longer exists; there is henceforth a separation
between public and private … (Marxism And Form, pp. 165-67.)
Clearly, then, what was once theorised as a difference between the pre-industrial
and the industrialized societies (the unity of the public and the private in one, the
separation of the two in the other) is now transposed as a difference between the first
and third worlds. The idea of the “concrete” is now rendered in only slightly different
vocabulary: “third-world culture … must be situational and materialist despite
itself.” And it is perhaps that other idea-namely that “preindustrialized . . . culture
knows no history; each generation repeats the same experience”-which is at the
root of now suspending the so-called third world outside the modern modes of
production (capitalism and socialism), encapsulating the experience of this third
world in the Hegelian metaphor of the master/slave relation, and postulating a unit-
ary form of narrativity (the national allegory) in which the “experience” of this third
world is to be told. In both texts, the theoretical authority that is invoked is, predicta-
bly, that of Hegel.
Likewise, Jameson insists over and over again that the national experience is
central to the cognitive formation of the third-world intellectual and that the narrativ-
ity of that experience takes the form exclusively of a “national allegory,” but this
emphatic insistence on the category “nation” itself keeps slipping into a much wider,
far less demarcated vocabulary of “culture,” “society,” “collectivity” and so on. Are
“nation” and “collectivity” the same thing? Take, for example, the two statements
which seem to enclose the elaboration of the theory itself. In the beginning we are
told:
All third-world texts are necessarily, I want to argue, allegorical, and in a very
specific way: they are to be read as what I will call national allegories, even when, or
perhaps I should say, particularly when their forms develop out of predominantly
western machineries of representation, such as the novel.
But at the end we find the following:
… the telling of the individual story and the individual experience cannot but
ultimately involve the whole laborious telling of the experience of the collectivity
itself.
Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the “National Allegory”
Are these two statements saying the same thing? The difficulty of this shift in
vocabulary is that one may indeed connect one’s personal experience to a
“collectivity”-in terms of class, gender, caste, religious community, trade union,
political party, village, prison-combining the private and the public, and in some
sense “allegorizing” the individual experience, without involving the category of “the
nation” or necessarily referring back to the “experience of colonialism and im-
perialism.” The latter statement would then seem to apply to a much larger body of
texts, with far greater accuracy. By the same token, however, this wider application of
“collectivity” establishes much less radical difference between the so-called first and
third worlds, since the whole history of realism in the European novel, in its many
variants, has been associated with ideas of “typicality” and “the social,” while the
majority of the written narratives produced in the first world even today locate the
individual story in a fundamental relation to some larger experience.
If we replace the idea of the nation with that larger, less restricting idea of
collectivity, and if we start thinking of the process of allegorisation not in nationalistic
terms but simply as a relation between private and public, personal and communal,
then it also becomes possible to see that allegorisation is by no means specific to the
so-called third world. While Jameson overstates the presence of “us,” the “national
allegory,” in the narratives of the third world, he also, in the same sweep, understates
the presence of analogous impulses in US cultural ensembles. For, what else are, let us
say, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow or Ellison’s The Invisible Man but allegorisations
of individual-and not so individual-experience? What else could Richard Wright
and Adrienne Rich and Richard Howard mean when they give to their books titles
like Native Son or Your Native Land, Your Life or Alone With America? It is not only
the Asian or the African but also the American writer whose private imaginations
must necessarily connect with experiences of the collectivity. One has only to look at
black and feminist writing to find countless allegories even within these postmoder-
nist United States.
VI
I also have some difficulty with Jameson’s description of “third-world literature”
as “non-canonical,” for I am not quite sure what that means. Since the vast majority
of literary texts produced in Asia, Africa and Latin America are simply not available
in English, their exclusion from the US/British “canon” is self-evident. If, however,
one considers the kind of texts Jameson seems to have in mind, one begins to wonder
just what mechanisms of canonisation there are from which this body of work is so
entirely excluded.
Neruda, Vallejo, Octavio Paz, Borges, Fuentes, Marquez et al. (i.e., quite a few
15
Aijaz Ahmad
writers of Latin American origin) are considered by the American academy as major
figures in modern literature. They, and even their translators, have received the most
prestigious awards (the Nobel for Marquez, for instance, or the National Book
Award for Eshleman’s translation of Vallejo) and they get taught quite as routinely in
literature courses as their German or Italian contemporaries might be, perhaps more
regularly in fact. Soyinka was recently canonised through the Nobel Prize and
Achebe’s novels are consistently more easily available in the US book market than are,
for example, Richard Wright’s. Edward Said, a man of Palestinian origin, has had
virtually every honor the US academy has to offer, with distinct constituencies of his
own; Orientalism, at least, gets taught widely, across several disciplines-more
widely, it seems, than the work of any other leftwing literary/cultural critic in this
country. V.S. Naipaul is now fully established as a major English novelist, and he does
come from the Caribbean; he is, like Borges, a “third-world writer.” Salman
Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children was awarded the most prestigious literary award in
England and Shame was immediately reviewed as a major novel, almost always
favorably, in virtually all the major newspapers and literary journals in Britain and
the US. He is a major presence on the British cultural scene and a prized visitor to
conferences and graduate departments on both sides of the Atlantic. The blurbs on
the Vintage paperback edition of Shame-based partly on a quotation from the New
York Times-compare him with Swift, Voltaire, Stern, Kafka, Grass, Kundera and
Marquez. I am told that a PhD dissertation has been written about him at Columbia
already. What else is canonisation, when it comes to modern, contemporary, and in
some cases (Rushdie, for example) relatively young writers?
My argument is not that these reputations are not well-deserved (Naipaul is of
course a different matter), nor that there should not be more such canonisations. But
the representation of this body of work in Jameson’s discourse as simply “non-
canonical” (i.e., as something that has been altogether excluded from the contempo-
rary practices of high textuality in the US academy) does appear to over-state the case
considerably.
Jameson later speaks of “non-canonical forms of literature such as that of the
third world,” compares this singularized form to “another non-canonical form” in
which Dashiell Hammett is placed, and then goes on to say:
Nothing is to be gained by passing over in silence the radical difference of non-
canonical texts. The third-world novel will not offer the satisfactions of Proust or
Joyce; what is more damaging than that, perhaps, is its tendency to remind us of
outmoded stages of our own first-world cultural development and to cause us to
conclude that “they are still writing novels like Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson.”
Now, I am not sure that realism, which appears to be at the heart of Jameson’s
characterization of “third-world literature” in this passage, is quite as universal in
16
Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the “National Allegory”
that literature or quite as definitively superseded in what Jameson calls “first-world
cultural development.” Some of the most highly regarded US fictionists of the present
cultural moment, from Bellow and Malamud to Grace Paley and Robert Stone, seem
to write not quite “like Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson” but surely within the realist
mode. On the other hand, Cesaire became so popular among the French surrealists
because the terms of his discourse were contemporaneous with their own, and Neruda
has been translated by some of the leading poets of the US because he is even formally
not “outmoded.” Novelists like Marquez or Rushdie have been so well received in the
US/British literary circles precisely because they do not write like Dreiser or Sher-
wood Anderson; the satisfactions of their outrageous texts are not those of Proust or
Joyce but are surely of an analogous kind, delightful to readers brought up on
modernism and postmodernism. Cesaire’s Return to the Native Land is what it is
because it combines what Jameson calls a “national allegory” with the formal
methods of the Parisian avant-garde of his student days. Borges is of course not seen
in the US any longer in terms of his Latin American origin; he now belongs to the
august company of the significant moderns, much like Kafka.
To say that the canon simply does not admit any third-world writers is to
misrepresent the way bourgeois culture works, i.e., through selective admission and
selective canonisation. Just as modernism has now been fully canonised in the
museum and the university, and as certain kinds of marxism have been incorporated
and given respectability within the academy, certain writers from the “third world”
are also now part and parcel of the literary discourse in the US. Instead of claiming
straightforward exclusion, it is perhaps more useful to inquire as to how the principle
of selective incorporation works in relation to texts produced outside the metropoli-
tan countries.
VII
I want to offer some comments on the history of Urdu literature, not in the form
of a cogent narrative, less still to formulate a short course in that history, but simply
to illustrate the kind of impoverishment that is involved in the a priori declaration
that “all third-world texts are necessarily … to be read as national allegories.”
It is, for example, a matter of some considerable curiosity to me that the Urdu
language, although one of the youngest linguistic formations in India, had neverthe-
less produced its first great poet, Khusrow, in the 13th century, so that a great
tradition of poetry got going, but then it waited roughly six centuries before begin-
ning to assemble the first sizeable body of prose narratives. Not that prose itself had
not been there; the earliest prose texts in Urdu date back to the 8th century, but those
were written for religious purposes and were often mere translations from Arabic or
Farsi. Non-seminarian and non-theological narratives-the ones that had to do with
17
Aijaz Ahmad
the pleasures of reading and the etiquettes of civility-began appearing much, much
later, in the last decade of the 18th century. Then, over two dozen of them got
published during the next ten years. What inhibited that development for so long, and
why did it happen precisely at that time? Much of that has to do with complex social
developments that had gradually led to the displacement of Farsi by Urdu as the
language of educated, urban speech and of prose writing in certain regions of North-
ern India.
That history we shall ignore, but a certain material condition of that production
can be specified: many, though by no means all, of those prose narratives of the 1810s
got written and published for the simple reason that a certain Scotsman, John Gil-
christ, had argued within his own circles that employees of the East India Company
could not hope to administer their Indian possessions on the basis of Persian alone,
and certainly not English, so that Fort William College was established in 1800 for the
education of the British in Indian languages, mainly in Urdu of which Gilchrist was a
scholar and exponent. He hired some of the most erudite men of his time and got
them to write whatever they wanted, so long as they wrote in accessible prose. It was
a stroke of genius, for what came out of that enterprise was the mobilisation of the
whole range of vocabularies existing at that time-the range of vocabularies were in
keeping with the pedagogical purpose-and the construction of narratives which
either transcribed the great classics of oral literature or condensed the fictions that
already existed in Arabic or Farsi and were therefore part of the cultural life of the
North Indian upper classes. Thus, the most famous of these narratives, Meer Am-
man’s Bagh-o-Bahar, was a condensation, in superbly colloquial Urdu, of the monu-
mental Qissa-e-Chahar Dervish, which Faizi, the great scholar, had composed some
centuries earlier in Farsi, for the amusement of Akbar, the Mughal king who was
almost an exact contemporary of the British Queen, Elizabeth.
But that was not the only impulse and the publishing house of Fort William
College was in any case closed within a decade. A similar development was occurring
in Lucknow, outside the British domains, at exactly the same time; some of the Fort
William writers had themselves come from Lucknow, looking for alternative
employment. Rajab Ali Beg Saroor’s Fasana-e-A’jaib is the great classic of this other
tradition of Urdu narrativity (these were actually not two different traditions but
parts of the same, some of which got formed in the British domains, some not). In
1848, eight years before it fell to British guns, the city of Lucknow had twelve printing
presses, and the consolidation of the narrative tradition in Urdu was inseparable from
the history of those presses. The remarkable thing about all the major Urdu prose
narratives which were written during the half century in which the British completed
their conquest of India is that there is nothing in their contents, in their way of seeing
the world, which can be reasonably connected with the colonial onslaught or with
any sense of resistance to it. By contrast, there is a large body of letters and even of
18
Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the “National Allegory”
poetry which documents that colossal carnage. It is as if the establishment of printing
presses and the growth of a reading public for prose narratives gave rise to a kind of
writing whose only task was to preserve in books at least some of that Persianized
culture and those traditions of orality which were fast disappearing. It is only in this
negative sense that one could, by stretching the terms a great deal, declare this to be a
literature of the “national allegory.”
The man, Pandit Naval Kishore, who gave to the language its first great publish-
ing house, came somewhat later, however. His grandfather had been employed, like
many upper caste Hindus of the time, in the Mughal ministry of finance; his own
father was a businessman, genteel and affluent but not rich. Naval Kishore himself
had a passion for the written word; but like his father and grandfather, he also
understood money. He started his career as a journalist, then went on to purchasing
old hand-written manuscripts and publishing them for wider circulation. Over time,
he expanded into all sorts of fields, all connected with publishing, and gave to Urdu
its first great modern archive of published books. Urdu, in turn, showered him with
money; at the time of his death in 1895, his fortune was estimated at one crore rupees
(roughly a hundred million British pounds). He had to publish, I might add, more
than national allegories, more than what came out of the experience of colonialism
and imperialism, to make that kind of money.
But let me return to the issue of narration. It is a matter of some interest that the
emergence of what one could plausibly call a novel came more than half a century
after the appearance of those early registrations of the classics of the oral tradition
and the re-writing of Arabic and Farsi stories. Sarshar’s Fasana-e-Azad, the most
opulent of those early novels, was serialised during the 1870s in something else that
had begun emerging in the 1830s: regular Urdu newspapers for the emergent middle
classes. Between the traditional tale and the modern novel, then, there were other
things, such as newspapers and sizeable reading publics, much in the same way as one
encounters them in a whole range of books on English literary history, from Ian
Watt’s The Rise of the Novel to Lennard J. Davis’ more recent Factual Fictions. And I
have often wondered, as others have sometimes wondered about Dickens, if the
structure of Sarshar’s novel might not have been very different had it been written not
for serialisation but for direct publication as a book.
Those other books, independent of newspapers, came too. One very prolific
writer, whose name as it appears on the covers of his books is itself a curiosity, was
Shams-ul-Ulema Deputy Nazir Ahmed (1831-1912). The name was actually Nazir
Ahmed; “Shams-ul-Ulema” literally means a Sun among the scholars of Islam and
indicates his distinguished scholarship in that area; “Deputy” simply refers to the
fact that he had no independent income and had joined the Colonial Revenue Service.
His training in Arabic was rigorous and immaculate; his knowledge of English was
spotty, since he had had no formal training in it. He was a prolific translator, of
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Aijaz Ahmad
everything: the Indian Penal Code, the Indian Law of Evidence, the Quran, books of
astronomy. He is known above all as a novelist, however, and he had one anxiety
above all others: that girls should get modern education (in which he represented the
emergent urban bourgeoisie) and that they nevertheless remain good, traditional
housewives (a sentiment that was quite widespread, across all social boundaries). It
was this anxiety that governed most of his fictions.
It is possible to argue, I think, that the formative phase of the Urdu novel and the
narratives that arose alongside that novel, in the latter part of the 19th century and
the first decades of the 20th, had to do much less with the experience of colonialism
and imperialism as such and much more with two other kinds of pressures and
themes: (a) the emergence of a new kind of petty bourgeois who was violating all
established social norms for his own pecuniary ends (Nazir Ahmed’s own Ibn-ul-
Vaqt-“Time-Server,” in rough English approximation-is a classic of that genre);
and (b) the status of women. Nazir Ahmed of course took conservative positions on
both these themes and was prolific on the latter. But there were others as well.
Rashid-ul-Khairi, for example, established a very successful publishing house, the
Asmat Book Depot, which published hundreds of books for women and children, as
well as the five journals that came into my family over two generations: Asmat,
Khatoon-e-Mashriq, Jauhar-e-Nisvan, Banat, and Nau-Nehal. English approxima-
tions for the latter four titles are easier to provide: “Woman of the East,” “Essence of
Womanhood,” “Girls” (or “Daughters”), and “Children.” But the first of these titles,
Asmat, is harder to render in English, for the Urdu usage of this word has many
connotations, from virginity to honor to propriety, in a verbal condensation which
expresses inter-related preoccupations. That these journals came regularly into my
family for roughly forty years is itself significant, for mine was not, in metropolitan
terms, an educated family; we lived in a small village, far from the big urban centers,
and I was the first member of this family to finish high school or drive an automobile.
That two generations of women and children in such a family would be part of the
regular readership of such journals shows the social reach of this kind of publishing.
Much literature, in short, revolved around the issues of femininity and propriety, in a
very conservative sort of way.
But then there were other writers as well, such as Meer Hadi Hassan Rusva who
challenged the dominant discourse and wrote his famous Umrao Jan Ada about those
women for whom Urdu has many words, the most colorful of which can be rendered
as “women of the upper chamber”: women to whom men of property in certain
social milieux used to go for instruction in erotic play, genteel manner, literary taste,
and knowledge of music. The scandal of Rusva’s early 20th-century text is its propos-
ition that since such a woman depends upon no one man, and because many men
depend on her, she is the only relatively free woman in our society. He obviously did
not like Nazir Ahmed’s work, but I must also emphasize that the ironic and incipient
20
Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the “National Allegory”
“feminism” of this text is not a reflection of any westernisation. Rusva was a very
traditional man and was simply tired of certain kinds of moral posturing. Meanwhile,
the idea that familial repressions in our traditional society were so great that the only
women who had any sort of freedom to make fundamental choices for themselves
were the ones who had no “proper” place in that society-that subversive idea was to
re-appear in all kinds of ways when the next major break came in the forms of Urdu
narrativity, in the 1930s, under the banner not of nationalism but of the Progressive
Writers Union which was a cultural front of the Communist Party of India and had
come into being directly as a result of the united front policy of the comintern after
1935.
Critical realism became the fundamental form of narrativity thereafter, for
roughly two decades. “Nation” was certainly a category used in this narrative,
especially in the non-fictional narrative, and there was an explicit sense of sociality
and collectivity, but the categories that one deployed for that sense of collectivity were
complex and several, for what critical realism demanded was that a critique of others
(anti-colonialism) be conducted in the perspective of an even more comprehensive,
multi-faceted critique of ourselves: our class structures, our familial ideologies, our
management of bodies and sexualities, our idealisms, our silences. I cannot think of a
single novel in Urdu between 1935 and 1947, the crucial year leading up to de-
colonisation, which is in any direct or exclusive way about “the experience of colo-
nialism and imperialism.” All the novels that I know from that period are predomi-
nantly about other things: the barbarity of feudal landowners, the rapes and murders
in the houses of religious “mystics,” the stranglehold of moneylenders upon the lives
of peasants and the lower petty bourgeoisie, the social and sexual frustrations of
school-going girls, and so on. The theme of anti-colonialism is woven into many of
those novels but never in an exclusive or even dominant emphasis. In fact, I do not
know of any fictional narrative in Urdu, in the last roughly two hundred years, which
is of any significance and any length (I am making an exception for a few short stories
here) and in which the issue of colonialism or the difficulty of a civilizational en-
counter between the English and the Indian has the same primacy as, for example, in
Forster’s A Passage To India or Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet. The typical Urdu writer
has had a peculiar vision, in which he/she has never been able to construct fixed
boundaries between the criminalities of the colonialist and the brutalities of all those
indigenous people who have had power in our own society. We have had our own
hysterias here and there, far too many in fact, but there has never been a sustained,
powerful myth of a primal innocence, when it comes to the colonial encounter.
The “nation” indeed became the primary ideological problematic in Urdu litera-
ture at the moment of independence, for our independence too was peculiar: it came
together with the partition of our country, the biggest and possibly the most miserable
migration in human history, the biggest bloodbath in the memory of the sub-
21
Aijaz Ahmad
continent: the gigantic fratricide conducted by Hindu, Muslim and Sikh com-
munalists. Our “nationalism” at this juncture was a nationalism of mourning, a form
of valediction, for what we witnessed was not just the British policy of divide and
rule, which surely was there, but our own willingness to break up our civilizational
unity, to kill our neighbors, to forego that civic ethos, that moral bond with each
other, without which human community is impossible. A critique of others (anti-
colonial nationalism) receded even further into the background, entirely overtaken
now by an even harsher critique of ourselves. The major fictions of the 50s and
60s-the. shorter fictions of Manto, Bedi, Intezar Hussein; the novels of Qurrat ul
Ain, Khadija Mastoor, Abdullah Hussein-came out of that refusal to forgive what
we ourselves had done and were still doing, in one way or another, to our own polity.
There was no quarter given to the colonialist; but there was none for ourselves either.
One could speak, in a general sort of way, of “the nation” in this context, but not of
“nationalism.” In Pakistan, of course, there was another, overriding doubt: were we a
nation at all? Most of the leftwing, I am sure, said No.
VIII
Finally, I also have some difficulty with the way Jameson seems to understand the
epistemological status of the dialectic. For, what seems to lie at the heart of all the
analytic procedures in his text is a search for, the notion that there is, a unitary
determination which can be identified, in its splendid isolation, as the source of all
narrativity: the proposition that the “third world” is a singular formation, possessing
its own unique, unitary force of determination in the sphere of ideology (nationalism)
and cultural production (the national allegory).
Within a postmodernist intellectual milieu where texts are to be read as the
utterly free, altogether hedonistic plays of the signifier, I can well empathise with a
theoretical operation that seeks to locate the production of texts within a determi-
nate, knowable field of power and signification. But the idea of a unitary determina-
tion is in its origins a pre-marxist idea. I hasten to add that this idea is surely present
in a number of Marx’s own formulations as well as in a number of very honorable,
highly productive theoretical formations that have followed, in one way or another, in
Marx’s footsteps. It is to be seen in action, for example, even in so recent a debate as
the one that followed the famous Dobb-Sweezy exchange and which came to be
focused on the search for a “prime mover” (the issue of a unitary determination in the
rise of the capitalist mode of production in Western Europe). So, when Jameson
implicitly invokes this particular understanding of the dialectic, he is in distinguished
company indeed.
But there is, I believe, a considerable space where one could take one’s stand
between (a) the postmodernist cult of utter non-determinacy and (b) the idea of a
22
Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the “National Allegory”
unitary determination which has lasted from Hegel up to some of the most modern of
the marxist debates. For, the main thrust of the marxist dialectic, as I understand it, is
comprised of a tension (a mutually transformative relation) between the problematic
of a final determination (of the ideational content by the life-process of material
labor, for example) and the utter historicity of multiple, interpenetrating determina-
tions, so that, in Engels’ words, the “outcome” of any particular history hardly ever
corresponds to the “will” of any of those historical agents who struggle over that
outcome. Thus, for example, I have said that what constitutes the unity of the world
is the global operation of the capitalist mode of production and the resistance to that
mode which is ultimately socialist in character. But this constitutive fact does not
operate in the same way in all the countries of Asia and Africa. In Namibia, the
imposition of the capitalist mode takes a directly colonial form, whereas the central
fact in India is the existence of stable and widespread classes of capitalist society
within a post-colonial bourgeois polity; in Vietnam, which has already entered a
post-capitalist phase, albeit in a context of extreme devastation of the productive
forces, the character of this constitutive dialectic is again entirely different. So, while
the problematic of a “final determination” is surely active in each case it is consti-
tuted differently in different cases, and literary production must, on the whole, reflect
that difference.
What further complicates this dialectic of the social and the literary is that most
literary productions, whether of the “first world” or of the “third,” are not always
available for that kind of direct and unitary determination by any one factor, no
matter how central that factor is in constituting the social formation as a whole.
Literary texts are produced in highly differentiated, usually very over-determined
contexts of competing ideological and cultural clusters, so that any particular text of
any complexity shall always have to be placed within the cluster that gives it its
energy and form, before it is totalised into a universal category. This fact of over-
determination does not mean that individual texts merely float in the air, or that
“totality” as such is an impossible cognitive category. But in any comprehension of
totality, one would always have to specify and historicize the determinations which
constitute any given field; with sufficient knowledge of the field, it is normally possi-
ble to specify the principal ideological formations and narrative forms. What is not
possible is to operate with the few texts that become available in the metropolitan
languages and then to posit a complete singularization and transparency in the
process of determinacy, so that all ideological complexity is reduced to a single
ideological formation and all narratives are read as local expressions of a metatext. If
one does that, one shall produce not the knowledge of a totality, which I too take to
be a fundamental cognitive category, but an idealization, either of the Hegelian or of
the positivist kind.
What I mean by multiple determinations at work in any text of considerable
23
Aijaz Ahmad
complexity can be specified, I believe, by looking briefly at the problem of the cultural
location of Jameson’s own text. This is, ostensibly, a first-world text; Jameson is a US
intellectual and identifies himself as such. But he is a US intellectual of a certain kind;
not everyone is able to juxtapose Ousmane and Deleuze so comfortably, so well; and
he debunks the “global American culture of postmodernism” which he says is the
culture of his country. His theoretical framework, moreover, is marxist, his political
identification socialist-which would seem to place’this text in the second world. But
the particular energy of his text-its thematics, its relation with those other texts
which give it its meaning, the very narrative upon which his “theory of cognitive
aesthetics” rests-takes him deep into the third world, valorizing it, asserting it,
filiating himself with it, as against the politically dominant and determinant of his
own country. Where do I, who do not believe in the Three Worlds Theory, in which
world should I place his text: the first world of his origin, the second world of his
ideology and politics, or the third world of his filiation and sympathy? And, if “all
third-world texts are necessarily” this or that, how is it that his own text escapes an
exclusive location in the first world? I-being who I am-shall place it primarily in
the global culture of socialism (Jameson’s second world-my name for a global
resistance) and I shall do so not by suppressing the rest (his US origins, his third
world sympathies) but by identifying that which has been central to all his theoretical
undertakings for many years.
These obviously are not the only determinations at work in Jameson’s text. I
shall mention only two others, both of which are indicated by his silences. His is,
among other things, a gendered text. For, it is inconceivable to me that this text could
have been written by a US woman without some considerable statement, probably a
full-length discussion, of the fact that the bifurcation of the public and the private,
and the necessity to re-constitute that relation where it has been broken, which is so
central to Jameson’s discussion of the opposition between first-world and third-world
cultural practices, is indeed a major preoccupation of first-world women writers
today, on both sides of the Atlantic. And, Jameson’s text is determined also by a
certain racial milieu. For, it is equally inconceivable to me that this text could have
been written by a black writer in the US who would not also insist that black
literature of this country possesses this unique third-world characteristic that it is
replete with national allegories (more replete, I personally believe, than is Urdu
literature).
I point out the above for three reasons. One is to strengthen my proposition that
the ideological conditions of a text’s production are never singular but always several.
Second, even if I were to accept Jameson’s division of the globe into three worlds, I
would still have to insist, as my references not only to feminism and black literature
but to Jameson’s own location would indicate, that there is right here, within the belly
of the first world’s global postmodernism, a veritable third world, perhaps two or
24
Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the “National Allegory” 25
three of them. Third, I want to insist that within the unity that has been bestowed
upon our globe by the irreconcilable struggle of capital and labour, there are increas-
ingly those texts which cannot be easily placed within this or that world. Jameson’s is
not a first-world text, mine is not a third-world text. We are not each other’s civiliza-
tional Others.
- Article Contents
- Issue Table of Contents
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Social Text, No. 17 (Autumn, 1987), pp. 1-142
Front Matter [pp. 1 – 96]
Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the “National Allegory” [pp. 3 – 25]
A Brief Response [pp. 26 – 27]
Regarding Postmodernism. A Conversation with Fredric Jameson [pp. 29 – 54]
Plot Devices in the Occupation [pp. 55 – 66]
Faust’s Stages of Spiritual/Economic Growth and Takeoff into Transcendence [pp. 67 – 95]
A Review Play on Paul Virilio/Sylvere Lotringer, Pure War [pp. 97 – 105]
Simone de Beauvoir. Mother of Us All [pp. 107 – 109]
Simone de Beauvoir and the Limits to Freedom [pp. 111 – 122]
Simone de Beauvoir and the Existential Basis of Socialism [pp. 123 – 133]
Selections from Towards a Morals of Ambiguity, according to Pyrrhus and Cinéas [pp. 135 – 142]
Back Matter