Local oral literatures resist absorption into any unified Third World Literature category

Evidence

It is difficult to see how these other kinds of cultural producriviriesnot archival but local and tentative, generated nor by colonialism per se or by the East/West binary oppositions bur by histories at once older, more local, more persistent, more variegated and prolix, more complexly and viscerally feltare robe accommodated within a unitary archive of a ‘Third World Literature’, with irs own system of genres and categories. I have in mind here genres whtch are essentially oral and performative, sires of production located at great remove from the great cities, entire linguistic complexes as yet unassimilared inro grids of print and translation. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 318

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth tracing how Ahmad’s anti-unitary-archive critique of postcolonial canon-making parallels critiques of strategic essentialism’s flattening of internal difference.
• XREF: Connects to my existing thread on Spivak’s strategic essentialism and the homogenizing archive moves in postcolonial literary canon formation. — connects to: Third World Literature is a metropolitan fabrication, not a pre-existing category — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 192; Even marginal texts suffer whenever nation-theme questions dominate Third World reading. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 486; Structural linguistic asymmetry makes the third-world text unknowable to metropolitan theorists — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 376 (+14 more)

Broader Connections

• Literary criticism is structurally unequipped for oral-performative texts #corroborates (0.88) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 500
• Structural linguistic asymmetry makes the third-world text unknowable to metropolitan theorists #corroborates (0.82) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 376
• World literature theory fits macro-trends but cannot capture each text’s distinct form #corroborates (0.80) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 54
• The ‘Third World Literature’ category presumed a primordial civilizational difference from the West. #contradicts (0.80) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 100
• The Third World Literature canon marginalizes texts outside its authorized questions #complicates (0.78) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 211
• European-style national-literature categories distort India’s actual interlingual literary relations #corroborates (0.78) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 1095
• Third World Literature as a field was professionalized by metropolitan universities #corroborates (0.72) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 185