A Brief Response

Abstract

I can understand many of Aijaz Ahmad's reactions to my essay without, finally, losing feeling that it was worth doing and that these things were worth saying. The essay was intended as an intervention into a literary and critical situation, in which it seemed important to me to stress loss of certain literary functions and intellectual commitments in contemporary American scene. It seemed useful to dramatize that loss by showing constitutive presence of those things-what I called narrative allegory (namely coincidence of personal story and tale of tribe, as still in Spenser) and also political role of cultural intellectual-in other parts of world. To be sure, then returns to show that US literature also includes its own cultures (which escape categories in which describes hegemonic culture); and equally clearly, classical cultures of East (for example) are no more to be thought of as third-world cultures than English Renaissance is to be thought of as a first-world one. As for such categories, they are meant to stimulate perception of difference by imposing comparisons and comparative operations that do not always suggest themselves automatically in our present academic division of labor, where Lu Xun belongs to Chinese departments and Ousmane (if to anything) to French departments. I believe that we have every interest in developing a kind of comparative cultural study (on model, say, of Barrington Moore's comparative sociology) in which such disparate texts are juxtaposed, not to turn both into the thing, but rather with a view towards establishing radical situational difference in cultural production and meanings. The methodological problem is that such differences can only be established within some larger preestablished identity: if there is nothing in common between two cultural situations, then clearly establishment of difference is both pointless and given in advance. What this means is that if Identity and Difference are fixed and eternal opposites, we have either a ceaseless alternation, or a set of intolerable choices: presumably there would be no great advantage gained by junking category of third world if result is that North America then becomes the same as subcontinent, say. But nothing is to be done with sheer random difference either, which either leaves us back in Boasian anthropology or in empiricist history of one damned thing after another. The claim of dialectic as a distinct mode of thought is to set categories like those of Identity and Difference in motion, so that

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 60 citations exist upstream.