ABSTRACT
Aijaz Ahmad has missed an opportunity, I think. His book is in one sense powerfully new. He re-examines the rise of literary theory with the vivid historical grounding of the debates surrounding post-war independence as well as the decisive contributions of international communism itself. By the book’s end, it is difficult to contest that communism was deeply and productively linked to what is normally called decolonization, and that its record has been ignored or grotesquely distorted by current cultural theory.
