This article conceptualizes the relationship between the transitional aspect of third‐world nationhood and its allegorical aspect. It argues that to say that the moment of national self‐determinations is “transitional” is not to say that it is a necessary “stage” in the path to proletariat self‐determination. Rather, “transition” designates a present nonidentical with itself, in which an undetermined contest for hegemony determines the politics of an anti‐colonial movement. Given this nonidentity of such a movement with itself, its every document must be treated allegorically, that is, as necessarily contesting any totalizing representation of the movement as a “national” movement. This article takes as its occasion Fredric Jameson's controversial argument that all third‐world texts project a “political dimension,” by rendering individual stories as “national allegories.” The author shows that the persistently undialectical dimension of Jameson's argument, which amounts to a “stagist” reduction of the aforesaid transitional aspect of nationhood, springs from his refusal to see how these very third‐world texts invariably also flip the national‐allegorical script by treating—as proposed above—the nation as allegory: as an inadequate form of appearance for diverse struggles for self‐determination that needs to be read not with but against its own grain.
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
January 2025
Research Article|
January 01 2025
The Ironies of National Allegory
Paresh Chandra
Paresh Chandra is an assistant professor of English at Williams College. He is interested in poetry and poetics, questions of form and organization in literature and politics, critical and postcolonial theory, and histories of political struggle and critique. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Radical Notes, Critique, The Cambridge Companion to Romanticism and World Literature, and Kant and Literature Studies (Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Literature).
Search for other works by this author on:
South Atlantic Quarterly (2025) 124 (1): 113–126.
Citation
Paresh Chandra; The Ironies of National Allegory. South Atlantic Quarterly 1 January 2025; 124 (1): 113–126. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-11557785
Download citation file:
Advertisement
109
Views