Issues of class and culture: an interview with Aijaz Ahmad - Interview

Monthly Review, Oct, 1996 by Ellen Meiksins Wood

In these circumstances, one is struck by two parallel developments in the ideological realm of what gets called "cultural studies." There is the idea of the discreteness of identities, cultural, ethnic, or national; a kind of remorseless differentialism, whereby I am not permitted the claim that I may understand your identity but I am supposed to simply respect whatever you say are the requirements of your identity. In this ideology, any number of people celebrate hardened boundaries between self and other, denounce what they understand as the "universalism" of the Enlightenment, rationalism, and so on, while also fully participating in the globalization of consumption patterns and the packaging of identities as so many exhibits. At the same time and often from the same people, we also have the propagation of the idea of infinite hybridity, migrancy, choice of alternate or multiple identities, as if new selves could be fashioned in the instant out of any clay that one could lay one's hands on, and as if cultures had no real historical density and identities could be simply made up, sui generis, out of the global traffic and malleability of elements taken from all over the world.

Q: In the same article, you remark that "postcoloniality is also like most things a matter of class." This kind of emphasis on class is, of course, deeply unfashionable. Without dwelling on the notion of "postcoloniality" (if it isn't too frivolous to ask for an answer in such a limited space), would you care to justify the sweeping proposition that "most things" are a matter of class?

Ahmad: Let me first make explicit a rather memorable reference there. In her biography of Chu Teh, the great commander of the People's Army during the Revolution in China, Agnes Smedley recalls a moment when she had asked him about his having been a bandit and a thief in his youth. As Smedley tells it, Chu Teh fell silent for a while and then said something like, "Theft, you know, is also a matter of class." I read that book when I was a very young boy but the truth of that simple statement has stayed with me all these years, and in paraphrasing those words I just wanted to record my admiration for both Smedley and Chu Teh.

But you have asked me to justify those words. I'm not sure how one justifies words so obviously true. India is said to have a population between 900 and 1,000 million. Roughly half of them are illiterate; but no bourgeois is illiterate anywhere in the world and those who constantly speak of "the pleasure of the text" are never poor. Roughly half of the world's blind people live in India; but blindness too is a matter of class, in the sense that blindness is overwhelmingly a disease of the poor and in the sense that such high incidence of blindness has a lot to do with living in conditions that produce blindness, with number and quality of hospitals, with the ability to pay for cure and care. What needs to justify itself is that other kind of blindness, which refuses to see that most things area matter of class. That refusal is itself very intimately a matter of class.