African-American intellectuals largely rejected Third World Literature as not encompassing their slave-derived specificity

Evidence

It is significant that although the category of ‘Third World Literature’ posited itself in terms of West and non-West, white and non-white, its reception among the African-American literary intelligentsia, among whom those terms have the most profound resonance, was at best contradictory. Many used it as a descriptive category, to signify a coalition of nonwhite minorities; ‘Third World Women’, for example, meant non-white women who needed to articulate a feminism different in some key respects from the high-bourgeois feminism of many white professionals, with oppressions of race and class layered together with the issue of gender. In another kind of emphasis, Black Third-World ism was designed to broaden the perspective·beyond the issue of African origin, to include more modern dimensions of the experience which was, in turn, shared with other coloured inhabitants of the inner cities, the ghettos, the barrios. ‘Third World Literature’, however, attracted few Black intellectuals. It was among reachers of Black Literature that the perception was immediate, even though it remained largely untheorized, that this category referred to literatures of the other minorities, the ones who were constituted not by slavery but by immigration. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 341

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s tracing of identity category formation. The category ‘Third World Literature’ functions like strategic essentialism — a coalitional umbrella that proves fragile precisely because it flattens materially distinct histories (slavery vs. immigration). — connects to: Orientalism and Third World Literature are complementary homogenizing gestures served by ethnic intellectuals — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 824; Third World Literature theory mostly excluded African-American intellectuals — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 138; Third World Literature excluded descendants of slavery, attracting only immigrant minorities — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 341 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Third World Literature theory mostly excluded African-American intellectuals #expands (0.85) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 138
• Third World Literature excluded descendants of slavery, attracting only immigrant minorities #expands (0.85) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 341
• The Third World Literature canon marginalizes texts outside its authorized questions #expands (0.75) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 211
• Local oral literatures resist absorption into any unified Third World Literature category #corroborates (0.72) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 318