Third-World Literature* and the Nationalist Ideology What, then, are the conditions within which this new sub-discipline of Literature, namely Third World Literature', has been assembled within the metropolitan university? My summary treatment of these conditions shall emphasize a specific grid of four, mutually supportive elements—namely, (a) the contemporary situation of literary theory itself; (b) the new availability and increasing influence in the metropolitan countries of a large number of literary texts composed by non-Western writers; (c) the arrival and increasing numbers there of intellectuals and students 1-[8 fr011^ ^e non-Western countries; and (d) the arrival, during this same period, of a new political theory, namely the Three Worlds Theory, which eventually had the widest possible circulation in many variants, including, especially, the one popularized by certain sections of the Parisian avant-garde which saw in it a convenient alternative to classical Marxism—convenient, I might add, because one could thus retain and even enhance one's radical credentials. An added element, specifically in the United States, was the rise of a new, nationalist segment of the Black petty bourgeoisie which did not wish to be contaminated with any political affiliation with the working class, wished equally strongly to mark its difference from the dominant culture of white supremacy, and for whom therefore Pan-Africanism and Third Worldism were the natural ideological moorings. As regards the contemporary situation of literary theory, it is well to recall that English Studies during the period between the two World Wars was dominated by four main tendencies: the practical criticism of I. A. Richards; the conservative, monarchist, quasi-Catholic criticism of T. S. Eliot; the American New Criticism; and some elements of avant-gardist Modernism which nevertheless remained much less theorized in the Anglo-Saxon countries than in Continental Europe. Protest against these exclusivist and elitist emphases came earlier in England, where there had been a much stronger tradition of socially conscious literary study, and the Scrutiny group, led by F. R. Leavis, assimilated the pedagogical value of practical criticism but also insisted on locating the texts of English literature in the larger narrative of English social life. More recent critiques of the Leavis tendency, as for example in Mulhem's The Moment of 'Scrutiny', have documented this group's own deep complicity in the ideologies of the Tory middle class; and, Leavis' almost messianic vision of English Studies as the determinate mode of cultural salvation for England has been documented often enough. There was also a populist kind of radicalism in their positions, however—as indicated, for example, in Quincy Leavis' acid remark on Virginia Woolfe's novels that such fiction is possible only for a class where the actual business of living is left to the servants. This populist edge is what Raymond Williams picked up, and then combined it with his own Welsh working-class background, as well as with his past in the Communist Party, even as he returned from the War and started working on his magisterial work. Culture and Society. Over the next twenty years or so, he produced a large number of studies—including The Country and the City, which is possibly the most moving book of literary criticism ever written in the English language—which went over the same territory as the one Journal of Arts & Ideas