Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the “National Allegory”

Abstract

In assembling the following notes on Fredric Jameson's Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capital,* I find myself in an awkward position. If I were to name the one literary critic/theorist writing in the US today whose work I generally hold in the highest regard, it would surely be Fredric Jameson. The plea that generates most of the passion in his text-that the teaching of literature in the US academy be informed by sense not only of western literature but of world literature; that the so-called literary canon be based not upon the exclusionary pleasures of dominant taste but upon an inclusive and opulent sense of heterogeneity-is of course entirely salutary. And, I wholly admire the knowledge, the range of sympathies, he brings to the reading of texts produced in distant lands. Yet this plea for syllabus reform-even his marvelously erudite reading of Lu Xun and Ousmane-is conflated with, indeed superseded by, much more ambitious undertaking which pervades the entire text but which is explicitly announced only in the last sentence of the last footnote: the construction of a theory of the of third-world literature. This cognitive aesthetics rests, in turn, upon suppression of the multiplicity of significant difference among and within both the advanced capitalist countries and the imperialised formations. We have, instead, binary opposition of what Jameson calls the first and the third worlds. It is in this passage from plea for syllabus reform to the enunciation of cognitive aesthetics that most of the text's troubles lie. These troubles are, I might add, quite

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