Elite immigrant critics displaced the original national Third World canon

Evidence

As the elite immigrant intelligentsia located more or less permanently in the metropolitan countries began appropriating this counter-canonical category as their special preserve and archive, the emphasis kept shifting, from the epochal to the modern, erasing in the process the difference between documents produced within the non-Western countries and those others which were produced by the immigrant at metropolitan locations. With the passage of time, the writings of immigrants were to become greatly privileged and were declared, in some extreme but also very influential formulations, to be the only authentic documents of resistance in our time. It was at this point that the singular ascendancy of Salman Rushdie began, and it is notable that apart from Edward Said himself, the critics who have played the key role in redefining literary Third-Worldism in relation mainly to the immigrant, and have also cemented the relationship between this immigrant phenomenon and postmodern ways of reading that archive, have usually been of Asian origin. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 142

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s library — Rushdie and Said appear in the reading list, and this reworks assumptions about who owns a national literature. — connects to: Postmodernism’s dominance frames both critics and canonized Third World authors. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 488; Third World Literature as a field was professionalized by metropolitan universities; The category ‘Third World Literature’ emerged only when ex-colonial migrants demanded metropolitan middle-class inclusion (+2 more)
• SEED: Angle for an essay on how immigrant writing got privileged over nationally-produced literature as ‘the only authentic resistance’ — the economics of whose voice gets canonized.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: is the claim that the immigrant-appropriated canon erased the national-memory function testable in specific anthologies or syllabi?

Related

• Asian-origin critics, not Said, cemented immigrant-centered literary Third-Worldism (similarity 0.90)
• The category ‘Third World Literature’ emerged only when ex-colonial migrants demanded metropolitan middle-class inclusion (similarity 0.89)
• Third World Literature as a field was professionalized by metropolitan universities (similarity 0.88)
• English-writing non-Western intellectuals get elevated into representatives of whole continents (similarity 0.84)
• Postmodernism’s dominance frames both critics and canonized Third World authors. (similarity 0.83)
• Anglophone third-world intellectuals are elevated into representatives of entire civilizations. (similarity 0.80)
• Third-world writers have achieved real canonical standing in US academia. (similarity 0.80)
• Third World Literature is a metropolitan fabrication, not a pre-existing category (similarity 0.80)
• The Third World Literature category emerged from postwar metropolitan migration, not from textual accumulation (similarity 0.80)
• Claims that homogenize ‘Third World Literature’ obscure the imperialist-determined fortunes of its producing bourgeoisie (similarity 0.80)
• The original Third World canon meant pre-colonial texts produced outside the West (similarity 0.79)
• Third World Literature emerged only through the mediating archive of Western languages (similarity 0.79)
• Postmodernist critical fashion increasingly frames how Third World texts get canonized (similarity 0.79)
• Third World Literature as a category is built on Western language archives (similarity 0.79)
• Graduate students weaponize home-country texts as anti-canonical counter-documents (similarity 0.79)