Canon formation operates through selective admission, not outright exclusion

Evidence

To say that the canon simply does not admit any Third World writers is to misrepresent the way bourgeois culture works – through selective admission and selective canonization. Just as modernism has now been fully canonized in the museum and the university, and as certain kinds of Marxism have been incorporated and given respectability within the academy, certain writers from the ‘Third World’ are also now part and parcel of literary discourse in the USA. Instead of claiming straightforward exclusion, it is perhaps more useful to inquire how the principle of selective incorporation works in relation to texts produced outside the metropolitan countries. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 189

Categorization

• XREF: This builds on the broader institutional theory of cultural canonization — connects to Jameson’s essay being critiqued and to Bourdieu-style analyses of institutional legitimation. — connects to: Canon formation works by foreclosing certain questions while foregrounding others. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 484; Canon formation works by excluding certain questions from being asked
• SEED: Angle: how ‘selective incorporation’ of non-Western writers functions as an absorbing mechanism that neutralizes critique — the canon admits a few to control the many.

Related

• Non-Western literature’s exclusion from the canon is a translation problem, not literary exclusion (similarity 0.84)
• Canon formation works by excluding certain questions from being asked (similarity 0.83)
• Canon formation selects and dominates by excluding texts that genuinely belong to a period (similarity 0.82)
• Third-world writers have achieved real canonical standing in US academia. (similarity 0.81)
• A counter-canon arises only from an ideological cement, not aggregation (similarity 0.80)
• The Third World Literature canon marginalizes texts outside its authorized questions (similarity 0.79)
• Postmodernism’s dominance frames both critics and canonized Third World authors. (similarity 0.79)
• Canons do not exist until they are fabricated (similarity 0.78)