A national literature exceeds the sum of its regional literatures

Evidence

One of my arguments here is that we cannot posit a theoretical unity or coherence of an ‘Indian’ literature by assembling its history in terms of adjacent but discrete histories of India’s major language–literatures. A ‘national’ literature, in other words, has to be more than the sum of its regional constituent parts, if we are to speak of its unity theoretically. Given this position, I could not possibly be arguing at the same time that if we can assemble the historiographic knowledge of discrete national literatures in these tricontinental zones, we shall somehow arrive at a ‘Third World Literature’. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 486

I find it all the more difficult to speak of a ‘Third World Literature’ when I know that I cannot confidently speak, as a theoretically coherent category, of an ·Indian’ Literature. The purpose of this chapter, therefore, is not to pose, category by category, an ‘Indian Literature’ (the national specificity) against ‘Third World Literature’ (the rricontinental generality) bur, rather, to explore some of the difficulties we currently have in constructing such a category. One of my arguments here is that we cannot posit a theoretical unity or coherence of an ‘Indian’ literature by assembling its history in terms of adjacent but discrete histories of India’s major language-literatures. A ‘national’ literature, in other words, has to be more than the sum of its regional constituent parts, if we are to speak of its unity theoretically. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 1087

Categorization

• SEED: Angle for an essay on why ‘world literature’ anthologies fail: the category-unity problem that aggregate-part additions never solve.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 486; Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1087