Subversive Komplizenschaft

Zusammenfassung

Im Rahmen einer Auseinandersetzung mit Fredric Jamesons Aufsatz „Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism“ trifft der marxistische Kritiker des Postkolonialismus Aijaz Ahmad folgende Aussage: „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 USA 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 necessarily ...’ etc.), I realized that what was being theorized was, among other things, myself. Now, I was born in India and I write poetry in Urdu, a language not commonly understood among US intellectuals. So I said to myself: ‘All? ... necessarily?’ It felt odd. Matters became much more curious, however. For the further I read, the more I realized, with no little chagrin, that the man whom I had for so long, so affectionately, albeit from a physical distance, taken as a comrade was, in his own opinion, my civilizational Other. It was not a good feeling.“ (Ahmad 1987: 3)