The Three Worlds framework erases class and gender difference within nations

Evidence

For once the world is divided into three large unities, each fundamentally coherent and fundamentally external to one another, it is extremely difficult to speak of any fundamental differences within particular national structures – differences, let us say, of class or of gender formation. One is then forced, by the terms of one’s own discourse, to minimize those kinds of differences, and to absolutize, on the other hand, the difference between, say, the First and the Third Worlds. The preferred technique among cultural theorists, then, is to look at ‘Third World’ literary texts in terms always of their determination by the colonial encounter, but rarely in terms of their determination by class and gender formations, or from the standpoint of what the needs of a socialist cultural production, quite beyond the issue of colonial determination, might be. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 144

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how framing categories (like the Trees-as-infrastructure piece, or the sacrifice piece’s framings) structurally suppress alternative angles of analysis. — connects to: Postmodern First World contains its own internal Third Worlds along gender and race lines; Third-Worldist cultural theory structurally suppresses class and gender analysis

Related

• Postmodern First World contains its own internal Third Worlds along gender and race lines (similarity 0.89)
• Third-Worldist cultural theory structurally suppresses class and gender analysis (similarity 0.89)
• The ‘Third World Literature’ category presumed a primordial civilizational difference from the West. (similarity 0.82)
• The First World contains its own internal Third Worlds in its texts (similarity 0.82)
• Third World literary theory effaces Marxism-rooted radical cultural heritage (similarity 0.82)
• Metropolitan theory idealized the singularized Third World as the site of cultural opposition (similarity 0.81)
• Frame choices that collapse politics into nationalism versus postmodernism erase socialist alternatives. (similarity 0.80)
• The category ‘Third World’ has polemical but no theoretical status (similarity 0.79)
• The Three Worlds Theory logically forces national allegory as the only narratable form (similarity 0.79)
• Third World literary theory’s rise marked retreat from activist anti-imperialism (similarity 0.79)
• The term Third World originally named military non-alignment, not geography or modes of production (similarity 0.79)
• Three Worlds Theory subordinated mass movements to national-bourgeois states (similarity 0.79)
• Poststructuralist Third World theory arose as a substitute for failed nationalist ideology (similarity 0.79)
• Third World Literature emerged only through the mediating archive of Western languages (similarity 0.79)
• Third World Literature as a category is built on Western language archives (similarity 0.78)