The two statements that begin this chapter mark the poles of a longstanding debate over how metropolitan readers can and should read literary texts from other parts of the world. Critics and teachers of ‘postcolonial literature,’ that controversial yet entrenched catch-all term for non-Western texts, have long been aware that their reading is part of an economy in which literature from the global peripheries is consumed by a readership that is eager for spectacles of violence and poverty set in exotic locales. Graham Huggan describes the dilemma concisely: ‘The well-intentioned desire for “adversarial internationalization” - for the fashioning of global solidarities in the continuing anti-imperial struggle - must contend with the power of a market that seeks, in part, to contain such oppositional gestures’ (2001, 10-11). It is tempting, in such a context, to refuse the category of ‘postcolonial’ or ‘third-world’ literature altogether, in the name of the historical and cultural particularity of the many different places and times that these terms evidently subsume. But this does not relieve us of the problem, since there is still such a thing as ‘third-world’ literature, ‘If only in the mind of the metropolitan reader of books’ (Brennan, 1997, 26). Rather than wish this formation away, we might instead address how it works, in its popular and academic incarnations: which texts it includes and excludes, what knowledge it assumes, and what kinds of thinking it does or does not make possible.