Most Asian and African literary traditions remain unknown to American theorists
Evidence
The upshot is that major literary traditions – such as those of Bengali, Hindi, Tamil, Telegu and half a dozen others from India alone – remain, beyond a few texts here and there, virtually unknown to the American literary theorist. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 152
Categorization
- XREF: Resonates with the earlier chapter’s theme of language hierarchies and with reading on linguistic erasure in world-literature debates (e.g., Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters).
Related
- Non-Western literature’s exclusion from the canon is a translation problem, not literary exclusion (similarity 0.83)
- Asian and African literature is read through Latin American literary models (similarity 0.83)
- Structural linguistic asymmetry makes the third-world text unknowable to metropolitan theorists (similarity 0.83)
- Metropolitan literatures distort any theory of third-world writing built from them. (similarity 0.82)
- English, not any Indian language, forms India’s only unified national literary intelligentsia. (similarity 0.81)
- Third World Literature emerged only through the mediating archive of Western languages (similarity 0.80)
- India lacks institutions to systematize its multilingual literary knowledges (similarity 0.80)
- Western theorists depend structurally on indigenous translators who know the local languages (similarity 0.80)
- Metropolitan theory idealized the singularized Third World as the site of cultural opposition (similarity 0.80)
- India’s only unified literary intelligentsia works in English, not Indian languages (similarity 0.80)
- African literature entered US syllabi as nationalist evidence, not critical object (similarity 0.79)
- European-style national-literature categories distort India’s actual interlingual literary relations (similarity 0.79)
- Literature and culture are not coterminous with language and state boundaries (similarity 0.79)
- World literature is a category impossible for imperialized nations like India (similarity 0.79)
- Inter-language literary translation machinery in India is poorly institutionalized (similarity 0.79)