Diaspora 2:3 1993 Postcolonialism and the Dilemma of Nationalism: Aijaz Ahmad's Critique of Third-Worldism Neil Lazarus Brown University In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. Aijaz Ahmad. London: Verso, 1992. 1. The publication ofIn Theory has been eagerly awaited since 1987. That was the year in which Aijaz Ahmad made an important intervention into the fields of cultural studies and colonial discourse analysis in the United States by offering a powerful critique of a rather remarkable article, Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism, which Fredric Jameson had published a year earlier in the radical New York-basedjournal Social Text. Entitled Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the 'National Allegory,'1 and also appearing in Social Text, Ahmad's essay was among the first critiques of Jameson's article to be published; it has remained the most frequently cited and, arguably, the most comprehensive and authoritative. In retrospect, and in terms ofits epistemological structure, Jameson 's article now seems, to me at least, quite generally characteristic of much ofthe work that he has produced over the course ofthe past decadepreeminently, of course, on or about the subject of postmodernism . As in the famous 1984 essay, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic ofLate Capitalism, the Third-World Literature essay is studded with dazzling local insights that divert attention from, but ultimately fail to cover over, the insufficiency and untenability of Jameson's broadest conceptual claims. Although it represented a relatively unusual foray on his part into the field of Third World2 culture, readers aware of Jameson's deep and longstanding interest in the literature and film of such zones as Latin America and East Asia would not have found his brilliant and compelling thumbnail exposition of, for example, Lu Xun hard to credit.3 What did seem hard to credit, however, was the sheer presumptuousness of his essay's basic argument. For Jameson undertook to produce nothing less than an overarching and all-embracing theory of what he called third-world literature. On the basis of a few judiciously Diaspora 2:3 1993 drawn but patently selective examples, he advanced the global proposition that [a]ll third-world texts are necessarily . . . allegorical, and in a very specific way: they are to be read as what I will call national allegories. . . . [0]ne of the determinants of capitalist culture ... is a radical split between the private and the public , between the poetic and the political. . . . Our numerous theoretical attempts to overcome this great split only reconfirm its existence and its shaping power over our individual and collective lives. . . . [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 a 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. (Third-World Literature 69) Jameson is manifestly a systematizing thinker, if scarcely a systematic one. But so reckless and so grandiose were his claims on this particular occasion that they seemed positively to beg to be criticized . And criticized they have been: the Third-Worid Literature essay has been very widely read by scholars in the field of colonial discourse theory; few if any of them have had a good word to say about it.4 In his critique, Ahmad makes some of the obvious (if nevertheless necessary) points against Jameson that have also formed the basis of other commentaries. He observes, for instance, that Jameson 's neglect ofthe political questions ofintellectual labor, language, translation, publication, institutionalization, and access across the international division of labor leads him, willy-nilly, to construct . . . 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 (97). Similarly, he notes that the process of allegorization is by no means specific to the so-called Third World ... It...