The Case for Jameson, Or Towards a Maxian Pedagogy of World Literature

emphasis). Regrettably, this is precisely what Ahmad and other recent critics of
Jameson have failed to do in presenting his position. ¹

While one cannot expect Ahmad to provide commentary on the entire tra­
jectory of Jameson's published writings, especially in a short journal article, it
is nevertheless unfortunate that he seems unwilling to acknowledge the provi­
sional nature of Jameson's approach, the way in which the various conceptual
formulations in Jameson's criticism, from his earliest writings to the present,
are not to be understood absolutely but "as moments and figures, tropes, syn­
tactical paradigms of our relationship to the real itself" ( Jameson, Marxism
and Form 374). Secondly, one cannot help but regret the fact that many crit­
ics of Jameson, especially following the successes of his writings on postmod­
ernism, have now found it expedient to unmask for us Jameson's hidden
"imperialistic" agenda. In a recent issue of PMLA, for example, Jonathan Culler
has similarly observed that we must rethink current institutional demands for
controversy and novelty that require young critics to distort and misrepresent
their precursors to gain a hearing (534). In "Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness,"
Ahmad not only distorts and caricatures Jameson's theoretical position, he
also adopts the persona of the wounded and betrayed comrade, a rhetorical
strategy that is both offensive towards Jameson and patently unfair.

Hence, while we may not doubt that Jameson's approach to literature of
the Third World is not without its failings and insufficiencies, especially in its
tendencies towards macrological oversimplification, no merely critical assess­
ment of his various contributions to the problematic of the Third World, like
Ahmad's essay, will wholly satisfy the overriding urgency of the political and
economic questions that presently demand our attention. Among other rea­
sons, Jameson's writings on the Third World require our careful consideration
because they are both informed and validated by one of the most technologi­
cally advanced methods of cultural analysis presently available, historical
materialism. ² In this sense, the refusal to export Euro-American theory into
the Third World, or even Third World literature into Western academies, is
tantamount to condoning a prolonged and systemic underdevelopment of the
Third World--the superstructural replication of the economic at the level of
cultural production. Of course, Jameson's Marxism is also (and unavoidably)
an embarrassment of riches at the present historical moment of unequal devel­
opment and distribution between First and Third Worlds, but there is also a
sense in which the systemic contradictions of late capitalism do not invalidate
Jameson's position as much as they tend to verify it.

We may no more refuse to deploy the technological advances represented
by Jameson's Marxism in the context of the Third World than we may refuse
to deploy any other technology in the Third World on the basis of its ...