ABSTRACT
In an important, though highly controversial, article from 1986, Fredric Jameson argues the value to ‘First World’ intellectuals of close and careful analysis of ‘Third World’ literature, which for Jameson still has access to certain kinds of social experience that have been made almost entirely unavailable in the West as a result of the homogenizing effects of the postmodernist culture of late capitalism.2 Jameson’s article is now remembered (and often criticized) mostly for its elaboration of the notion that ‘national allegory’ may be the necessary mode of Third World literature. Meanwhile, his more fundamental point – that the Third World is an important source of new cultural energies in the era of late capitalism – is now almost forgotten, but only because it has been so widely accepted as to appear obvious. The two intervening decades have seen a veritable explosion in postcolonial studies, leading to a widespread acceptance of the notion that close and careful study of non-Western texts is not only rewarding but essential for anyone who would seek to understand world culture at this juncture in history. Among other things, by learning to understand that cultural phenomena such as the African novel may operate according to aesthetic principles different from those that have typically governed the central texts of the Western canon, we have gained a much better understanding of the historicity of aesthetic criteria in general while learning to challenge the traditional claim of universality that has long underwritten Western bourgeois aesthetics.
