In a controversial 1986 essay, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” the late literary critic Frederic Jameson argued that while the literature of the industrialized West had largely retreated from its political vocation, that wasn’t true of the great writers of the developing world. “Third-world texts,” Jameson wrote, “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’s destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society.”
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