Third World Literature

A once-influential critical category (and related literary-theoretical project, especially associated with Fredric Jameson) that grouped together literatures of the so-called ‘Third World’/‘developing’ nations as expressing national allegory or civilizational difference from the West. The claims treat it critically as a contested, historically contingent construct — arising amid socialist retreat and bourgeois-nationalist resurgence — and as a metropolitan/critical fabrication rather than a pre-existing natural category, one that also mostly excluded African-American intellectuals.

Claims that use this term

• The ‘Third World Literature’ category presumed a primordial civilizational difference from the West.
• The ‘Third World Literature’ category originated amid socialist retreat and bourgeois-nationalist resurgence.
• Third World Literature emerged only through the mediating archive of Western languages
• Third World Literature theory mostly excluded African-American intellectuals
• Third World Literature is a metropolitan fabrication, not a pre-existing category
• ‘Third World Literature’ functions as a counter-canon that limits admissible questions.