Abstract
In 1986, Fredric Jameson published an essay entitled ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’ in Social Text, a left-identified, New York-based journal of cultural politics. In retrospect, I am sure he wishes that he had not. For the essay has brought him nothing but brickbats.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Aijaz Ahmad, ‘Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the “National Allegory”’. Social Text 17 (1987): 3–26. Reprinted in In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London and New York: Verso, 1992): 95–122. Further references to this essay will be drawn from In Theory.
The locus classicus of colonialist discourse in this respect is probably the text that has come to be known as ‘Macauley’s Minute’ — Thomas Babington Macauley’s 1835 contribution to the debate then raging over the goals and content of colonial education in India. Macauley wrote: ‘I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works. I have conversed, both here and at home, with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the oriental learning at the valuation of their orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’. In Philip D. Curtin, ed., Imperialism (New York, Evanston, San Francisco, London: Harper & Row, 1971): 182.
Ciayatrt Chaxravorty Splvax, A Critlque or Postcolonlal Reason:owara a tiistory oj the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1999): 109–10. In a recent interview, Spivak claims never to have read Ahmad’s In Theory. She is ‘intellectually sensitive’, she says: ‘sometimes I keep myself from reading things that I have heard a good deal of, seen a lot of quotation from and so I say to myself “put this in the background for now. There is a lot of stuff to look at. You should carry on so that you don’t get into a defensive modex”’. ‘Mapping the Present: Interview with Gayatri Spivak’, conducted by Meyda Yegenoglu and Mahmut Mutman, New Formations 45 (2001–02): 17–18. In A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, however — published before this interview — she twice cites In Theory, not generally but in detail (41n, 273n). We must assume that the subsequent claim not to have read In Theory is meant as a provocation.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Theory in the Margin: Coetzee’s Foe Reading Defoe’s Crusoe/Roxana’. In Jonathan Arac and Barbara Johnson, eds, Consequences of Theory (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990): 172. Spivak rehearses this argument in Outside in the Teaching Machine (London and New York: Routledge, 1993): 60–61.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2004 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Lazarus, N. (2004). Fredric Jameson on ‘Third-World Literature’: A Qualified Defence. In: Homer, S., Kellner, D. (eds) Fredric Jameson: A Critical Reader. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230523524_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230523524_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-98209-9
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-52352-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave Social & Cultural Studies CollectionSocial Sciences (R0)