Third World Short Story as National Allegory
Fredric Jameson's 1986 essay "Third-World Literature in an Era of Multinational Capitalism," declares that unlike the literatures of the First World, Third World Literatures are necessarily national allegories. "Third World texts," Jameson argues, "even those which are seemingly private and invested with a properly libidinal dynamic, necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory; the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third world culture and society. Jameson also speculates that the disproportionate ratio of the political to the personal makes such texts alien to western readers. Click here to return to the Author's homepage
As a Marxist critic, Jameson is actually investing a positive value in the literatures of the Third World and chastizing the First World readers and writers on account of their literary narcissism, yet his theoretical project seems to be an inadequate representation of the literary life of the so-called Third World. First of all, Jameson's attempt reminds one of Thomas Babington Macauley, the English colonial administrator who theorized on the Orient in his 1854 essay "Minute on Education". Macauley wrote thus: "I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the 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 (597).
Though Jameson is saying quite the opposite here, the nature of the two theorizations are similar on account of their hasty generalization. In Jameson's sketching of what he calls a "theory of the c...
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...leasures, certain side glances, certain deceptive giggles, like a sense of the national allegory, because an awareness of the nationality of the text is the most rudimentary reading tool many of us could take along when we encounter a literary production of the other.
Works Cited
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The article “Indian Education and Missions in Colonial Virginia” by W. Stitt Robinson, Jr. focuses on native American education. This article gives great insight into trying to educate the Indians. Unfortunately, a lot of times the motive of teaching was to enforce Christian morals and improve relations. Now on the surface improving relations doesn’t sound bad, but the motive was
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Rudyard Kipling grew up in a very unstable home and environment in India, Bombay. He was bullied as a kid and had a bad family life. He turned to writing and reading as a way to cope with his abusive childhood and published his first book in 1902 (Stewart, britannica). His books display a variety of imperialist thoughts that revolve around racist intentions as well. Although Kipling can be read as a well-intentioned imperialist, his stories demonstrate that he is also a racist because he portrays the natives as savages, unclean and an inferior race and believes the help can help the “inferior races” civilize.
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