Abstract
The flip side of a supposedly apolitical literary postmodernism has long been the national allegory. In 1986 Fredric Jameson asserted in his controversial landmark essay, “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” that a preoccupation with collective (especially national) identity characterized much postcolonial writing; he differentiated this work from the way “American intellectuals have been discussing ‘America’” (65). The latter’s postmodernism typically sought to dissolve collective identities in favor of individualist and libidinal themes. Jameson famously called for a practice of cognitive mapping that would correct for the purportedly antipolitical tendencies of postmodernism, and in this essay he