Third World Literature emerged only through the mediating archive of Western languages

Evidence

In other words, over the past three decades or so a vast archive of texts has accumulated, which is available to the metropolitan university to examine, explicate, categorize, classify, and judge as to its worthiness for inclusion within its curriculum and canon. At the level of this greatly expanded archive of books produced in the ex-colonial countries but written in or translated into Western languages, a direct dialogue between, let us say, a Haitian and an Indian novelist could really take place, and something called ‘Third World Literature’, with its own generic classifications and categorizations, could ensue from that archival nearness; the irony of that operation would undoubtedly be that a Third World Literature would arise on the basis of Western languages, while Third-Worldist ideology is manifestly opposed to the cultural dominance of Western countries. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 126

In other words, over the past three decades or so a vast archive of texts has accumulated, which is available to the metropolitan university to examine, explicate, categorize, classify, and judge as to its worthiness for inclusion within its curriculum and canon. At the level of this greatly expanded archive of books produced in the ex-colonial countries but written in or translated into Western languages, a direct dialogue between, let us say, a Haitian and an Indian novelist could really take place, and something called ‘Third World Literature’, with irs own generic classifications and categorizations, could ensue from that archival nearness; the irony of that operation would undoubtedly be that a Third World Literature would arise on the basis of Western languages, while Third- Worldist ideology is manifestly opposed to the cultural dominance of Western countries. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 316

Categorization

• XREF: The irony here anticipates critiques later developed in Pascale Casanova’s ‘World Republic of Letters’ about the geography of literary consecration. — connects to: Third World Literature as a category is built on Western language archives; Third World Literature as a field was professionalized by metropolitan universities — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 185; Structural linguistic asymmetry makes the third-world text unknowable to metropolitan theorists — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 376 (+2 more)
• SEED: Angle: the ‘archive effect’ — how translational infrastructure, not shared literary kinship, manufactures world-literature units like ‘Third World Literature’.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 126; Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 316