Postcolonial Critique of the Thought of Jalal Al-Ahmad (Indigenous Discourse and the Concept of the West and Inferiority)

Indigenousness in Iran, like in other Third World societies, emerged as an alternative as a result of the displacement of the Western modernist discourse. The Western modernist discourse, which claimed to be universal, began to falter after World War II, becoming known as postcolonial theories. The main question of the research is what is the place of the concept of the West in the discourse of nationalism of Jalal Al-Ahmad. The research hypothesis is that the type of representation of the concept of the West in Jalal al-Ahmad's thought places him as a pioneer of postcolonial thought and the interpretation of his thought should be understood under the concept of "inferiority" in its Gramscian-Spivakian sense. It has been designed only in local and allegorical dimensions. The results of the research show that the critique of superior / inferior relations in Al-Ahmad's thought was designed in protest of Westernization and with the aim of returning to self and respecting the native culture, but remained at the level of essay writing and did not reach a coherent conceptual apparatus. In the process of articulating the indigenous discourse, Al-Ahmad was incapable of presenting a conceptual and universal formulation of his theory by transitioning from a local and indigenous perspective. The method of data collection is documentary and library.