SOURCE: “Decolonizing the Canon: Considerations of Third World Literature,” in New Literary History, Vol. 22, No. 3, Summer, 1991, pp. 505-24.

In the following essay, Gugelberger seeks to identify some common traits of “Third World Literature” and comments that, rather than being integrated into the traditional literary canon, it should be read for the insight it can provide into canonical texts.

One of our basic political tasks lies precisely in the ceaseless effort to remind the American public of the radical difference of other national situations.

Fredric Jameson¹

With revealing reference to Brecht, Ngugi wa Thiong'o in Barrel of a Pen stated what it is he considers to be the task of the Western writer in regard to “Third World Literature”: “He must expose to his European audience the naked reality of the relationship between Europe and the Third World. He has to show to his European reader that, to paraphrase...