Metropolitan theory inflates single genres into universal forms for the Third World

Evidence

It is doubtful, of course, that ‘magical realism’ has become ‘the literary language of the emergent post-colonial world’, any more than the ‘national allegory’ is the unitary generic form for all Third World narrativities, as Jameson would contend. Such pronouncements are now routine features of the metropolitan theory’s inflationary rhetoric. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 110

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how did ‘magical realism’ come to be treated as the default postcolonial mode despite being a Latin American export? Testable against which national literatures actually use it.
• ADDENDUM: Relates to the ‘Grafting & Growth’ essay sense of how literary conventions get naturalized as infrastructure — here a generic convention inflated into a universal.
• XREF: connects to: Metropolitan institutions assemble and control most knowledge produced about the Third World; Third World Literature as a category is built on Western language archives; Metropolitan literatures distort any theory of third-world writing built from them. (+3 more)

Related

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• Third World literary theory effaces Marxism-rooted radical cultural heritage (similarity 0.83)
• The Third World Literature category emerged from postwar metropolitan migration, not from textual accumulation (similarity 0.82)
• Third World Literature emerged only through the mediating archive of Western languages (similarity 0.82)
• Non-Western literature reaches readers mediated by metropolitan selection (similarity 0.82)
• World literature is a material category of metropolitan accumulation, not a universal condition (similarity 0.82)
• Postmodernist critical fashion increasingly frames how Third World texts get canonized (similarity 0.82)
• Third World Literature as a category is built on Western language archives (similarity 0.81)
• Third World Literature as a field was professionalized by metropolitan universities (similarity 0.80)
• Third World literary theory’s rise marked retreat from activist anti-imperialism (similarity 0.80)
• Structural linguistic asymmetry makes the third-world text unknowable to metropolitan theorists (similarity 0.80)
• Third-world writers have achieved real canonical standing in US academia. (similarity 0.80)