The Ironies of National Allegory.

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]