African literature entered US syllabi as nationalist evidence, not critical object

Evidence

It is symptomatic, for example, that this issue was first posed in the colleges and universities of the USA not in relation to the uses of literature in the building and representing of empires in Asia and Africa, but in relation to the Black experience within the United States. In so far as African-American intellectuals have no historical or cultural basis for thinking of Greece and Rome, the Cathedrals of St Peter and St Paul, Dante and Shakespeare, as their cultural pastat least, not in an exclusive way - significant segments among them, starting most markedly with Martin Delaney and DuBois, have often looked to Africa for their cultural origins. African literature now made its appearance in the American literary syllabi under increased Black nationalist pressure, not so much as an object of critical inquiry as evidence of achievement; the right to teach Senghor and Diop, Soyinka or Ngugi, was won against such odds and so very provisionally that one could not possibly interrogate this emergent counter-canon as one was only too glad to interrogate the existing canonicities. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 261

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the strategic essentialism bind: the counter-canon was won provisionally and thus shielded from interrogation—an institutional case of essentialism being strategically deployed then frozen. — connects to: Postcolonial theory recasts decolonization as a literary-critical rather than political contest — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 393

Broader Connections

• Postcolonial theory recasts decolonization as a literary-critical rather than political contest #complicates (0.80) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 393