The original Third World canon meant pre-colonial texts produced outside the West

Evidence

The main idea at that time was to construct a counter-canon produced, constitutively, outside Europe and North America; one that displayed some civilizational differences (the word ‘difference’ was at that time written with a lower-case ‘d’, as something local and empirically verifiable, not to denote any epistemological category or perennial ontological condition). Documents of the African past were to be the testimonies of African-American heritage in the old continent, as Homer or Shakespeare were the documents of Western civilization; the same applied to Latin American, Caribbean, and Asian literary documents as well. This counter-canon was to be composed, in other words, of documents which referred to that which had been left behind, which had been there before the journey, and which was now to be recouped – by the descendant of the slave, the immigrant, the incoming student – as a resource of both memory and hope. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 142

Meanwhile, there has been a very considerable shift in the composition of the archive which is ro represent the Thi_rd World in the metropolitan university, creating new kinds of possibilities for certain kinds of Black critics. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the category of Third World Literature first emerged, it was to apply, more or less strictly, to texts that were actually produced in the non-Western countries, and it included texts produced in all epochs, including most prominently those from the pre-colonial epochs. The main idea at that time was to construct a counter-canon produced, constitutively, outside Europe and North Amer- ica; one that displayed some civilizational differences (the word ‘difference’ was at that time written with a lower-case ‘d’, as something local and empirically verifiable, not to denote any epistemological category or perennial ontological condition). Documents of the African past were to be the testimonies of African-American heritage in the old continent, as Homer or Shakespeare were the documents of Western civilization; the same applied to Latin American, Caribbean, and Asian literary documents as well. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 354

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the original meaning of the ‘Third World Literature’ category before immigrants appropriated it — lower-case ‘d’ difference vs. epistemological ‘Difference’.
• XREF: Foreshadows Chapter 3’s treatment of Jameson’s national allegory, which depends on the canon originating within the nation. — connects to: Colonial periodization privileged one textual canon per religious period — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1165
• SEED: Angle: the genealogy of ‘difference’ from lowercase empirical marker to uppercase epistemological category is central to the strategic essentialism debate.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 142; Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 354