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Fredric Jameson and the Controversy over “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” | Global South Studies

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In 1986, the American literary critic and theorist Fredric Jameson published an essay in the journal Social Text titled “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” and the controversy it sparked became one the major intellectual events of the 1980s. Although Jameson does not speak of the “Global South” per se, his use of the conventional figure of the “third” world, which imagines the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc in Europe as the “second” and the United States, Canada, and Western Europe as the “first” worlds, Jameson’s argument appeared to encompass the literatures and nations often associated with the Global South. The idea that the diverse cultures of Africa, South America, and Southern Asia could be represented as having a single “Third-World” cultural logic was a major point of contention in the controversy over Jameson’s essay that ensued. As the author of such books as Marxism and Form (1974), The Prison-House of Language (1972), and The Political Unconscio

Print PDF Tally, Jr., Robert T.. November 9, 2017. "Fredric Jameson and the Controversy over “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism”." Global South Studies . Copy Citation In 1986, the American literary critic and theorist Fredric Jameson published an essay in the journal Social Text titled “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” and the controversy it sparked became one the major intellectual events of the 1980s. Although Jameson does not speak of the “Global South” per se , his use of the conventional figure of the “third” world, which imagine

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