Non-Western literature’s exclusion from the canon is a translation problem, not literary exclusion

Evidence

I also have some difficulty with Jameson’s description of ‘third-world literature’ as ‘non-canonical’, for I am not quite sure what that means. Since the vast majority of literary texts produced in Asia, Africa and Latin America are simply not available in English, their exclusion from the US/ British ‘canon’ is self-evident. If, however, one considers the kind of texts Jameson seems to have in mind, one begins to wonder just what mechanisms of canonization there are from which this body of work is so entirely excluded. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 183

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to broader debates about world literature and translation studies — echoes what later scholars like Pascale Casanova and David Damrosch tackled. — connects to: Emulation and mimicry cannot make non-Western literatures respectable — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 914

Related

• Third-world writers have achieved real canonical standing in US academia. (similarity 0.86)
• Canon formation operates through selective admission, not outright exclusion (similarity 0.84)
• Third World Literature emerged only through the mediating archive of Western languages (similarity 0.84)
• Graduate students weaponize home-country texts as anti-canonical counter-documents (similarity 0.84)
• The original Third World canon meant pre-colonial texts produced outside the West (similarity 0.83)
• Non-Western literature reaches readers mediated by metropolitan selection (similarity 0.83)
• Most Asian and African literary traditions remain unknown to American theorists (similarity 0.83)
• The Third World Literature canon marginalizes texts outside its authorized questions (similarity 0.82)
• Metropolitan literatures distort any theory of third-world writing built from them. (similarity 0.82)
• Third World Literature as a category is built on Western language archives (similarity 0.82)
• Asian and African literature is read through Latin American literary models (similarity 0.81)
• A totalizing theory silently excludes texts that contradict its category (similarity 0.81)
• Even marginal texts suffer whenever nation-theme questions dominate Third World reading. (similarity 0.81)
• Literary texts carry metropolitan processes of selection and classification inscribed in their texture (similarity 0.81)
• Metropolitan theory idealized the singularized Third World as the site of cultural opposition (similarity 0.81)