Aijaz Ahmad

Aijaz Ahmad was born in Muzaffarnagar, British Raj in 1941.[2] With his parents, he immigrated to Pakistan following partition.

He was a professorial fellow at the Centre of Contemporary Studies, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, India, visiting professor at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and visiting professor of political science at York University, Toronto, Canada. He also worked as an editorial consultant with the Frontline and as a senior news analyst for the news website Newsclick.[3][4]

In his book In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, Ahmad primarily discusses the role of theory and theorists in the movement against colonialism and imperialism.[5] Ahmad's argument against those who uphold poststructuralism and postmodernist conceptions of material history revolves around the fact that very little has been accomplished since the advent of this brand of postcolonial inquiry. The book contains an especially polemical critique of Fredric Jameson's argument in "Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism" where Ahmad attacks Jameson on the grounds that Jameson's argument is insufficiently theorized in its use of terms like "Third World" which appears to be defined purely in terms of its experience of colonialism. This in turn leads Jameson to make hasty and untenable generalizations about how all "third world literature" would necessarily function as a national allegory that according to Jameson works as resistance to a system of global postmodernism.

Ahmad in his book expresses his chagrin at how his critique of Jameson has been appropriated by postcolonial scholars as an attack on Marxism, while Ahmad contends that he takes issue with Jameson simply because his use of Marxism in the essay on Third World Literature is not rigorous enough. The book contains a lengthy critique of Edward Said's Orientalism[5] which Ahmad argues reproduces the very liberal humanist tradition that it seeks to undermine in its selection of Western canonized texts that are critiqued for their Orientalism, as this upholds the idea that Western culture is represented in its entirety through those very texts. Furthermore, Ahmad asserts that by tracing Orientalist thought all the way back to Ancient Greece it becomes unclear in Said's work whether Orientalism is a product of Colonialism, or whether Colonialism is, in fact, a product of Orientalism.

Ahmad died in Irvine, California, on 9 March 2022, at age 81. He was hospitalised for age-related ailments and had returned home only a few days prior to his death.[2][6]

1. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures - Verso, 1992.
2. A World To Win: Essays on the Communist Manifesto - with Irfan Habib and Prabhat Patnaik, LeftWord Books, 1999.
3. Lineages of the Present: Ideological and Political Genealogies of Contemporary South Asia - Verso, 2001.
4. On Communalism and Globalization: Offensives of the Far Right - Three Essays Collective, New Delhi, 2002.
5. Iraq, Afghanistan and the Imperialism of Our Time - LeftWord Books, New Delhi, 2004.
6. In Our Time: Empire, Politics, Culture - Verso, 2007

Edited

1. Ghazals of Ghalib - ed. by Aijaz Ahmad. Oxford India, 1995. (With translations from the Urdu by Aijaz Ahmed, W.S. Merwin, Adrienne Rich, William Stafford, David Ray, Thomas Fitzsimmons, Mark Strand, and William Hunt)
2. A Singular Voice: Collected Writings of Michael Sprinker - Editor (with Fred Pfeil and Modhumita Roy), 2000.

• On Post Modernism, The Marxist XXVII, January–March 2011.
• Nationalism and Globalization, Occasional Paper Series 4, Department of Sociology, University of Pune, 2000.
• Communalisms: Changing Forms and Fortunes
• Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the "National Allegory", Social Text, 1987 (On Fredric Jameson's article "Third-world Literature in the Era of Multinational Capital", 1986)
• Video. Aijaz Ahmad interviewed by Tariq Ali for The World Today. Part 1 and Part 2.