National Allegory and Beyond: Postcolonial Critique Now

Fredric Jameson's 1986 essay, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” is invoked in postcolonial studies mostly as an instance of a bad generalization, marking the moment, perhaps, of an unfortunate divergence between Marxist critique and postcolonial analysis. Aijaz Ahmad's forceful rejoinder to the essay made it impossible for a generation of postcolonial critics to benefit from Jameson's propositions about Third World literature, leading many to turn away, as well, from a substantive consideration of how the method of literary criticism outlined in The Political Unconscious may reshape the field of postcolonialism. Intricately connecting formalism to historicism, narrative to ideology, The Political Unconscious articulated an indispensable Marxist literary method to read cultural forms politically. Here I explore what this method may contribute to postcolonial critique, in view of the fact that recent years have seen numerous declarations of the demise of the postcolonial moment of the 1980s and the 1990s, nowhere more visible than in the frantic search for ever new nomenclatures, whether those of “world literature” or the “global anglophone.” To my mind, not only are such proclamations of obsolescence misguided, they also urgently require us to heed Jameson's famous prescription to “Always historicize!” (Political Unconscious 9). In this essay, accordingly, I suggest that resolving the question of how literary methods relate to socioeconomic forms demands a self-reflexive look into our own intellectual history of the last four decades.¹ The space for such a deliberation seems not only possible but, I would submit, quite urgent, given the disjuncture between the converging catastrophes of our moment (including ongoing failure to secure postcolonial sovereignty, worsening global economic inequality, rising attacks on migrants and refugees, and multiple ecological crises) and recent conversations (with misplaced and puzzling prominence) calling the very enterprise of ideology critique into question. The challenges of our time underline once again the importance of what Jameson concludes at the end of The Political Unconscious—the historical demand for “the simultaneous recognition of the ideological and Utopian functions of the artistic text” as a yardstick for Marxist political praxis (299). Figuring out an apposite method for postcolonial critique in the twenty-first century requires reckoning once again with the foundational works of the field's provenance.²

The phenomenology of the postcolony is difficult to capture in theory, given the sheer heterogeneity of the object of analysis and the multiplicity of the forces acting on the subject. But in contrast to recent moves toward ontological thinking, allegory by way of Jameson's example in The Political Unconscious could help elaborate a core concern of postcolonial critique—how to reconcile lived experience with structural totality, and how to navigate the specificity of the local while still establishing comparative connections across time and space. I revisit Jameson's essay not just to correct the historical record of an important flash point in Marxist and postcolonial thought, but to probe the still-resonant question of national allegory itself. What does revisiting the thesis that all Third World literature must be read as a national allegory allow us to see today, in terms of both the history of postcolonial studies over the last four decades and the current state of the field? Can we think today of allegorical reading as an archetypal postcolonial practice? Does a postcolonial text require different methods of reading than a Western one? To begin to answer these questions, I turn first to the notion of Third World difference and the problem of allegory as articulated by Jameson and then to the status of the nation in relation to the privileged genre of the novel. Next, I speculate about the necessity of a map of postcolonial genres corresponding to shifts in modes of production, and I conclude with the frame of romance as an analytic that can bring together Marxist and postcolonial literary methods.

Third World Difference

“Third-World Literature” makes a powerful argument for the value of the Third World text in the US classroom, one we are still grappling with despite much lip service to diversifying the curriculum and producing global citizens. As a call for the reinvention of the category of world literature, Jameson provides an alternative to more recent frames that signal a dissatisfaction with the moniker of the postcolonial—whether under the rubric of the “global anglophone” or of “world literature”—most of which remain fully shorn of the project of “the whole laborious telling of the experience of the collectivity itself” (86). While current approaches in world literature tend to pluck the individual text and writer out of a particular geopolitical location, Jameson's imperative is to place the work within that site in order to unravel larger stories about historical transitions in time and space, enabling in turn a subtle theorizing of both difference and conjunction. As he explains in The Political Unconscious, literary genres sediment vital traces of superseded narrative forms and modes of production, which is why a literary text can illuminate history's absent causality, alongside totality's appearance in parts or as a social contradiction that the text is trying to resolve or allegorically articulate, thus making History not only “what hurts” but the “ground and untranscendable horizon” of our work (102).

In “Third-World Literature,” Ahmad's charge notwithstanding, in seeking to define a relation between “us” and “them” outside the vocabulary of developmental latecomer or “civilizational other” (Ahmad 96), Jameson recognizes the risks that attend his insistence on the radical difference of the Third World (with a nod to Edward Said's insights in Orientalism) at the same time that he dismisses the alternative of a defanged liberal individualism.³ Sidestepping liberal notions that promise parity but rely on temporal othering (where the Third World text is but a belated and insufficient copy of Western modernity), Jameson provides a structural reason for aesthetic difference by probing the different modes of production operative in China and Senegal. He unmistakably refuses to situate Third World cultures as “anthropologically independent or autonomous”; instead, he argues, “they are all in various distinct ways locked in a life-and-death struggle with first-world imperialism,” itself subject to “their penetration by various stages of capital” (“Third-World Literature” 68). Hence his distinct interpretations of Lu Xun and Ousmane Sembène through Marxist concepts of “Asiatic” and “primitive” modes of production.

Many of the infamous generalizations from the essay—the notion that the Third World text is a belated expression of modernity already explored by Proust or Joyce or the futility of the defense of noncanonical literature as offering the same satisfactions as the canon—are in fact proposed by Jameson as examples of “terribly parochial” responses (66). Indeed, in his recent commentary on the history of this essay, Jameson underscores “the insularity and parochialism of an Americanist literary study for which foreign and foreign-language literatures (even the European ones) scarcely exist” (Allegory and Ideology 187). The Western reader (and critic) in “Third-World Literature” emerges as remarkably limited, cautious, uncurious, fearful, and atomized. Western intellectuals in fact are “soundly sleeping in that indestructible iron room, of which Lu Xun spoke, on the point of suffocation” (77). Americans, in particular, as “masters of the world” are limited by their “epistemologically crippling” “view from the top”—incapable of “grasping the social totality” (85). In contrast, the relation between public and private in the Third World has not yet been completely subsumed, allowing Third World culture to be “situational and materialist” (85) not as an expression of some everlasting truth or ontology but because it must, on account of its structural relationship of subalternity to the First World. Clearly, for Jameson, the meaning of these categories of more than one world materializes only in the relationship of power that constructs them within history: the Third World exists because the First World sees it as such. Accordingly, his use of Hegel's master-slave dialectic does not differentiate (as Ahmad contends) “those who make history and those who are mere objects of it” (100) but rather works to position the First and Third Worlds in a dialectical relationship. Jameson's claim about national allegory for the Third World and postmodernism for the First should thus be seen not as a prescription but as a diagnosis. And the master-slave dialectic reveals only that it is the West that remains captive, unable to grasp structural totality.

To identify a distinct practice of reading for First and Third Worlds both then and now does not automatically imply succumbing to intractable difference. Rather, it means recognizing, as Jameson shows with his sensitive reading of Lu Xun's “Diary of a Madman,” that what seems like an individual pathology must be read as a wider attempt to reckon with China as a political entity, without assuming a static present or a one-to-one correspondence between the aesthetic text and the political destiny. The critical payoff of such a method further emerges in his reading of Sembène's Xala, where in the face of the crisis of representation brought about by decolonization and its failures, “the generic transformation of the narrative” speaks at once to past, present, and future (“Third-World Literature” 84). Jameson shows how Sembène evokes older tribal values in the face of postcolonial failure, giving us a “double historical perspective” by way of “generic discontinuities” as comedy turns to tragedy, satire to ritual, realism to prophecy (83). In other words, though Jameson insists—famously—that “all third-world texts are necessarily . . . 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” (69), his literary readings reveal that allegorical method embeds rather than transcends history and neither fetishizes difference nor functions as an oppressive universalism that masks its own particularism. Above all, the specific historical situation of each literary example determines the valence of chosen forms and their meaning. Allegory, thereby, does not impose any kind of homogeneity or fixity to Third World literature; instead, reading allegorically authorizes the critic to discern the poetic and the political (or Freud and Marx, to paraphrase Jameson) at once. Allegory does not work the same way in the First World—it fails to coincide the political and the psychic, the collective and the individual—not because it remains irrelevant or absent as a form but because it is unconscious. If anything, then, Third World literature appears as the vanguard for Marxist method in Jameson's essay rather than a derivative or belated supplement.⁴ And today, as postcolonialists, we should seize that possibility for our field.

National Allegory and Its Discontents

Given the immense heterogeneity of postcolonial literary styles and forms, it is not necessary to ascribe a singular reading practice for the field. And defending allegory tout court is not my goal here, nor do I wish to specify static demarcations between postcolonial and Western literatures. But I do want to insist that Jameson's core insight—that the relation between public and private spheres in the postcolony is not as thoroughly overtaken by the forces of capitalism as in the West (an argument elaborated in Jameson's Postmodernism)—can be defended as a historical claim in the nation-building era after decolonization, when sweeping social and political projects of building a collective identity loomed large for those writers who sought to provide a cognitive map of the era. Distinctions between the West and the rest that were in sharper focus four decades ago have certainly blurred since then, partly as a result of the increasing penetration of the forces of global capital everywhere, and partly as a consequence of the post-1989 realignment of the world order. While such a shift does mean that calculating the technology of mediation among Western and non-Western readers is no longer possible in such broad outline, even as the circulation of Third World texts in metropolitan and local markets assumes ever more varied routes, recognizing the ongoing usefulness of allegorical reading as one possible mode of postcolonial literary critical practices should not be difficult.

In fact, it would be easy to argue that actually existing postcolonialism does prioritize allegorical readings of precisely the kind championed in “Third-World Literature.” We do tend to read narratives as socially symbolic acts and for the collective. Any number of foundational fictions in the field—from Peter Abrahams's A Wreath for Udomo to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun to J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians to Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines to Ahmed Saadawi's Frankenstein in Baghdad—could productively be interpreted as national allegories, marking the collective experiences of such historical events as decolonization, civil war, apartheid, partition, and foreign occupation. When Ghosh figures a house divided in The Shadow Lines in Dhaka, despite the author's protestations that writing about family is a way of not writing about the nation, it is difficult not to see it as allegorical of the logic of partition in the Indian subcontinent, where houses divided by family disputes do map onto territorial conflicts among nation-states. We can thus fully appreciate the eccentricity of the narrator's grandmother's desire to donate her blood to aid India's efforts in the 1965 war against Pakistan—she is thrilled that “we're fighting them properly at last, with tanks and guns and bombs” (232)—and the specific cause of her derangement after her nephew Tridib is killed in a riot. But at the same time, we can recognize a larger constellation of Indian nationalism in the 1960s, fertilized by ideologies of war and sacrifice (in the way that Benedict Anderson describes), as well as by patriarchy and religion. To do so is not to reify rhetorics of otherness, but to understand unique characters moving within and against larger social, political, and economic forces. And these forces do operate in such novels within the frame of the nation. Accordingly, “Third-World Literature” should be seen as participating in the rethinking of nations and nationalism that launched the field of postcolonial studies, alongside Imagined Communities. As Jameson observes in The Political Unconscious, drawing on Tom Nairn's warning that the national question remains “Marxism's great historical failure” (qtd. on 298), to talk about nationalism and form is to recognize that “one of the most urgent tasks for Marxist theory today . . . is a whole new logic of collective dynamics” (294).⁵

Because the formal end of empire did not dismantle the colonial state, merely transferring power into the hands of a newly forming elite, how might we characterize the political and cultural economy of the postcolony? Frantz Fanon's warnings in “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness” have never rung truer: that after decolonization, the national bourgeoisie will slide into its historic role of “intermediary,” becoming “the transmission line between the nation and a capitalism, rampant though camouflaged, which today puts on the masque of neocolonialism” (122). If the nation-state cannot be thought of as any kind of guarantor of liberation, what role do we assign it in the twenty-first century, as we track its varying critical genealogies—multiple declarations of its obsolescence after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 giving way in our own time to a slow dawning realization of rising extreme nationalisms, populisms, and neofascisms across the globe? Denationalizing programs and the attacks on citizenship papers undertaken against the Rohingya in Burma, the Windrush generation in Britain, and Muslims and other minority groups in India reveal the fragility of our liberal political containers. Their very form, we might say, following The Political Unconscious, carries the potential to be repressive. Could we assert that ethnonationalism is now a force that links the First and Third Worlds, as fascist politics resurge and recombine in multiple sites, enjoining on us new ways of reading for history as well as for the utopian glimmer of a countercollectivity?

Freedom and Necessity

A different charge leveled against “Third-World Literature” concerns the insistence on what Jameson elsewhere calls “a single vast unfinished plot” (Political Unconscious 20). Jameson is often criticized alongside other Marxists for being invested in a totalizing explanation of history that creates a schematic narrative linking past to present and reduces cultural phenomena to the effluvia of capitalist systems. We may consider his claim in The Political Unconscious that “the novel is the end of genre . . .: a narrative ideologeme whose outer form, secreted like a shell or exoskeleton, continues to emit its ideological message long after the extinction of its host” (151). If we accept this appraisal, would we need to rethink common readings of the postcolonial novel as a vital tool of self-definition in the nation-building era? Will colonialism, which as Said argued was central to the development of the novel as a genre, not continue to exert its sedimented force long after the break of decolonization? If so, what autonomy or distinction can the postcolonial novel claim? Here we might recall George Lamming's astonishing insistence that the third most significant event in British Caribbean history after “discovery” and “the abolition of slavery and the arrival of the East” (36) was “the discovery of the novel by West Indians as a way of investigating and projecting the inner experiences of the West Indian community” (37), and even more so, the paradox that these novelists refused to write middle-class novels modeled on the English example, but focused on the West Indian peasant, who for the first time “became other than a cheap source of labor” (39).

Much postcolonial ink has been spilled worrying that the Marxist method outlined in The Political Unconscious necessitates seeing the postcolony as a belated player in the linear story of transition from a feudal mode of production to the industrial or as a passive recipient of modernization (whether in the language of civilization during colonial rule, that of development in the mid–twentieth century, or that of globalization in late capitalism). Such concerns occupy Partha Chatterjee in “Whose Imagined Communities?,” where he argues that Anderson's insistence on the modularity of nationalism means that those in the postcolonial world can “only be perpetual consumers of modernity” and not “true subjects of history.” And so Chatterjee laments: “Even our imaginations must remain forever colonized” (5).⁶ The double bind that emerges in such discussions—either difference or homogenization, universalist appropriation or postcolonial singularity—has no easy resolution. Common misreadings of Jameson's claims that “the human adventure is one” and that “the essential mystery of the cultural past” can be fathomed “only if retold within the unity of a single great collective story” (Political Unconscious 19) presume that speaking at this level of generalization implies that postcolonial literature cannot be read on its own terms. But as Lamming's example shows, it seems to me that there is nothing in Jameson's framework that disavows transformations of the genres that are borrowed from, or forced upon, postcolonial writers by colonial predecessors. In fact, the transformations across time of such genres as the historical novel and the bildungsroman are precisely his concern, and we can extend his insights about genres as “literary institutions” and “social contracts” into the present and for different geopolitical projects (106).

In sum, this is a call for us to read postcolonial literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the way that Jameson reads the nineteenth-century realist novel, gleaning ideologies of form that wrest “Freedom” from “Necessity” (Political Unconscious 19). How do we theorize postcolonial forms in the wake of national liberation and the ruins and rot of globalization and neoliberalism? How can the postcolonial novel as a genre outgrow, or rebel against, its colonial origins, refusing the role of Caliban or Macauley's mimic? Existing conversations about combined and uneven development, world systems literature, and peripheral realisms have taught us how to calibrate cultural forms in the twentieth century with the broken and damaged systems of our era. But we still need a map of the literary field that doesn't remain relentlessly American or Eurocentric even as it speaks the bland language of the global anglophone. In essence, new theories of the form of the postcolonial novel in relation to time and space will help us imagine new forms of collectivity for our catastrophic times. We are often told that what comes after modernity and postmodernity is nothing but apocalypse and permanent crisis. And that literature cannot have any autonomy or subversive power in the era of corporate capture of our vocabularies of liberation. But we can historicize the very cycles of postcolonial fiction's booms and busts and connect them to repeated cycles of economic growth and decline.⁷ The Political Unconscious invites us to discern what such formal shifts may register.

While space does not permit me to dwell on these questions of form and history at length, I hope they will serve as a prolegomenon of sorts, toward a more robust left postcolonial analysis for the twenty-first century. In closing, I would invoke Jameson's rethinking of romance by way of Hayden White and Northrop Frye as one possible rewarding opening for the field. If the circuit of realism, romance, and modernism is legible in nineteenth-century India as the competing desires for difference and similarity from the British (as Chatterjee shows in Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World), in the symbolic economy of early African postcolonial writing (as Simon Gikandi demonstrates), as a tussle between nation and diaspora in Black Atlantic intellectual production (as I argue elsewhere), as the very structure of anticolonial thought (as David Scott suggests in Conscripts of Modernity, preferring tragedy as an alternative to romance), and as a problem of nationalist desire confronting the limits of the real (as Dipesh Chakrabarty submits with regard to Rabindranath Tagore in Provincializing Europe), how might we update these conversations about romance and the possibility of glimpsing redemption today? As Jameson argues in The Political Unconscious, Marxism as a philosophy itself is a romance, and instead of seeking to escape that association with redemption and prophecy, we can understand the many uses of romance—to sense “other historical rhythms” and potentialities beyond the “asphyxiating” realistic options at hand (104). In the same way, the project of postcolonial critique can also be understood as a romance, and may allow us, in this historical conjuncture of endless crisis, to reexpress “Utopian longings,” renew our “meditation on the Utopian community,” and reconquer, at whatever price, “some feeling for a salvational future” (105). The novels we read can re-create vanishing lifeworlds, revise unsatisfactory histories, and conjure up desirable futures, if we are willing to grapple with the constitutive contradiction of ideology and utopia at the heart of the rubric of the postcolonial.