Third World Literature theory mostly excluded African-American intellectuals

Evidence

This involved no small degree of wariness, partly because it is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the Asian immigrant’s middle-class aspiration that even as he/she speaks constantly of non-Western origin, he/she wishes to join, within the United States, not the racially oppressed African-American community, but the privileged white middle class. It is also symptomatic that virtually all the theorizations of Third World Literature in the United States have come either from the immigrant or from that section of the elite white intelligentsia which normally pays scant attention to African-American literature and culture. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 138

It is significant that although the category of ‘Third World Literature’ posited itself in terms of West and non-West, white and non-white, its reception among the African-American literary intelligentsia, among whom those terms have the most profound resonance, was at best contradictory. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 341

Categorization

• XREF: Complicates the simple white-vs-nonwhite framing of the category; parallels the ‘model minority’ scholarship situating Asian immigrants against Black America. — connects to: Third World Literature excluded descendants of slavery, attracting only immigrant minorities — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 341; African-American intellectuals largely rejected Third World Literature as not encompassing their slave-derived specificity — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 341
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 138; Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 341