Literary Colonialism: Books in the Third World

Most Third World people have limited access to the world body of knowledge, and even information about their own countries is often hard to come by. One reason is that the majority of publishing houses in the world are either located in the West or controlled by Westerners. In this essay, the author describes the difficulty of publishing in the Third World as part of a larger relationship of dependence of developing countries on industrialized nations. The author, who has done research in India and published a number of books in that country, concludes his discussion with suggestions for expanding Third World autonomy in the area of knowledge production.