The ‘Third World Literature’ category originated amid socialist retreat and bourgeois-nationalist resurgence.

Evidence

It was in this moment of retreat for socialism, and resurgence of the nationalism of the national bourgeoisie, that the theoretical category of ‘Third World Literature’ arose, as did the new emphasis on analyses of the ‘Colonial Discourse’, pushing the focus of thought not into the future but into the past. Since nationalism had been designated during this phase as the determinate source of ideological energy in the Third World by those same critics who had themselves been influenced mainly by poststructuralism, the disillusionment with the (national-bourgeois) state of the said Third World which began to set in towards the later 1980s then led those avant-garde theorists to declare that poststructuralism and deconstruction were the determinate theoretical positions for the critique of nationalism itself. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 106

Categorization

• QUESTION: Investigate the specific timeline and institutional sites where the ‘Third World Literature’ category was coined and codified.
• XREF: connects to: Claims that homogenize ‘Third World Literature’ obscure the imperialist-determined fortunes of its producing bourgeoisie

Related

• Claims that homogenize ‘Third World Literature’ obscure the imperialist-determined fortunes of its producing bourgeoisie (similarity 0.88)
• Poststructuralist Third World theory arose as a substitute for failed nationalist ideology (similarity 0.87)
• Cultural nationalism remains the constitutive ideology of Third World literary theory. (similarity 0.86)
• Third World literary theory’s rise marked retreat from activist anti-imperialism (similarity 0.85)
• Third World Literature emerged only through the mediating archive of Western languages (similarity 0.84)
• The ‘Third World Literature’ category presumed a primordial civilizational difference from the West. (similarity 0.84)
• Third World literary theory effaces Marxism-rooted radical cultural heritage (similarity 0.84)
• Third World Literature is a metropolitan fabrication, not a pre-existing category (similarity 0.84)
• Third-worldist nationalism regresses from the Marxist critique it displaces (similarity 0.83)
• The Third World Literature category emerged from postwar metropolitan migration, not from textual accumulation (similarity 0.83)
• Cultural nationalism is constitutive of postcolonial theory’s theoretical stances. (similarity 0.83)
• The category ‘Third World’ has polemical but no theoretical status (similarity 0.83)
• Literary theory’s rejection of nationalism mirrors poststructuralism’s rise (similarity 0.83)
• Third World Literature as a category is built on Western language archives (similarity 0.83)
• The category ‘Third World Literature’ emerged only when ex-colonial migrants demanded metropolitan middle-class inclusion (similarity 0.82)