Now, I am not sure that realism is quite as universal in [‘Third World Literature’] or quite as definitively superseded in what Jameson calls ‘first-world cultural development.’ Some of the most highly regarded US fictionists of the present cultural moment, from Bellow and Malamud to Grace Paley and Robert Stone, seem to write not quite ‘like Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson’ bur surely within the realist mode. On the other hand, Césaire became so popular among the French Surrealists because the terms of his discourse were contemporaneous with their own, and Neruda has been translated by some of the leading US poets because he is even formally not ‘outmoded.’ Novelists like Garcia Marquez or Rushdie have been so well received in US/British literary circles precisely because they do nor write like Dreiser or Sherwood Anderson; the satisfactions of their outrageous texts are nor those of Proust or Joyce but are surely of an analogous kind, delightful to readers brought up on modernism and postmodernism. Césaire’s “Return to the Native Land” is what it is because it combines what Jameson calls a ‘national allegory’ with the formal methods of the Parisian avant-garde of his student days. Borges, of course, is no longer seen in the USA in terms of his Latin American origin; he now belongs to the august company of the significant moderns, much like Kafka. To say that the canon simply does nor admit any Third World writers is to misrepresent the way bourgeois culture works – through selective admission and selective canonization. Just as modernism has now been fully canonized in the museum and the university, and as certain kinds of Marxism have been incorporated and given respectability within the academy, certain writers from the ‘Third World’ are also now part and parcel of literary discourse in the USA. Instead of claiming straightforward exclusion, it is perhaps more useful to inquire how the principle of selective incorporation works in relation to texts produced outside the metropolitan countries.
Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (112–3)
















