Graduate students weaponize home-country texts as anti-canonical counter-documents

Evidence

Interwoven into these patterns of immigration is the ambiguous status of the incoming graduate student who comes from elsewhere, who studies under the full weight of the existing canonicity, who rebels against it, who counterposes other kinds of texts against the so-called canonical text, especially if any are available from his or her own part of the world. These other kinds of texts become, then, the ground, the document, even the counter-canon of her or his national self-assertion. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 328

Categorization

• XREF: This is the site from which strategic essentialism typically gets performed — the elite student renegotiating canonicity rather than a subaltern speaking. — connects to: Local oral literatures resist absorption into any unified Third World Literature category — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 318; Printing permanently canonized colonial distortions of non-European peoples — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 369; The Third World Literature canon marginalizes texts outside its authorized questions — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 211

Broader Connections

• Printing permanently canonized colonial distortions of non-European peoples #contradicts (0.75) — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 369
• Local oral literatures resist absorption into any unified Third World Literature category #complicates (0.72) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 318
• The Third World Literature canon marginalizes texts outside its authorized questions #complicates (0.70) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 211