Peripheral Modernism in Theory

Inevitable and Unnecessary: On Modernism from the Periphery Redux

A problem that touches on the topics of this essay and is worth being discussed in light of the dependence caused by cultural backwardness is that of influences of various types, good and bad, inevitable and unnecessary.

Antonio Candido,

"Literature and Underdevelopment"

The question of peripheral modernism is a question riddled with anxieties. Anxieties about competence, originality, and elitism, determinedly mediated by the seductions of institutional recognition.[1] Against this background, disillusionment rules, dark feelings abound, and theory equivocates. The category itself appears to defy stability: it is as stringent as it is elastic, as promising as it is fateful. As a modifier, peripheral obscures what has from its inception been considered a mysterious concept, from Perry Anderson’s declaration that “[m]odernism as a notion is the emptiest of all cultural categories,” to Carlos Blanco Aguinaga’s undeniable perception that “confusion reigns among hegemonic theoreticians as to what modernism is or is not,” to Sean Latham’s and Gayle Rogers’ more recent reminder that “the word [modernism] has often been flexible, capacious, inventive, and unstable.”[2] Modernism’s elusiveness has motivated all manner of bewilderment. In one of her provocations, Susan Stanford Friedman admits to having no expectation “of determining or discovering a fixed meaning for terms like modernity and modernism. I expect differences.”[3] To construct a definition of peripheral modernism on such unsteady grounds seems not only ill-advised but altogether foolish, for if modernism, as Eric Hayot suggests, “represents situations—no longer worlds—in which no single shared experience dominates, in which communication becomes cacophony,” it would be silly at best to advocate for a literary modality capable of registering the shared cultural experience of the global periphery.[4] Yet as the essays in this Modernism/modernity cluster demonstrate, peripheral modernist situations can be both distinctive and resonant, uniquely grounded and consonantly oriented. No single shared experience may dominate, but a recurring set of questions, intuitions, and dissidences suggest a common concern for the scalar forces that modulate any given experience of peripherality. This cluster pursues the argument that any attempt to theorize the ambivalent styles and formal incongruities of peripheral modernism demands that some kind of generality be kept at play.

Meanwhile, motivated by the construction of new critical perspectives and interdisciplinary dialogues, recent efforts to think modernism globally have tended to relinquish the problem of peripherality in favor of the “multicentric and pluralizing” frameworks of planetarity.[5] Echoing David Joselit’s call to discard the concept of medium, for example, Tatiana Flores defends the need to move “beyond centre-periphery” to instead “think in terms of networks or ‘heterogeneous configurations.’”[6] Similarly, an emphasis on conciliation rather than confrontation has led to the analytical rescindment of the oppositions and comparative structures that, like the center-periphery model, have proven to be too limiting and reductive, too flattening and restrictive to grasp the plurality of modernist contexts—or so goes the story. If such a predisposition has enabled a meaningful expansion of the concept of modernism (across media, disciplines, historical circumstances, and linguistic traditions), it is also true that, precisely because of their expansive impetus, efforts to think modernism globally have produced, in the words of Mark Wollaeger, “much . . . in the form of cautionary theorizing and anxious questioning,” oftentimes to the detriment of the conceptual and in favor of the descriptive.[7] Taking and alternative approach, the essays collected in this cluster ask what a theoretical recentering of the category of the periphery might entail now that transnational modernist studies has matured into a seemingly limitless archive of forms and relationships.

Conjectures on Peripheral Modernism

The main problem for the conceptualization of a peripheral modernism is the determination of the common aesthetic grounds produced by the very phenomenon of peripherality. At least initially, this problem expresses itself in the tension between the affirmation of a common cultural experience and the obligation to preserve a democratic conjecture, namely that the appraisal of peripheral literatures should not be a function of their alignment with a hegemonic aesthetic paradigm, modernist or otherwise (writing a novel à la Joyce), or, relatedly, that no narrative mode can be said to be inherently more meaningful or visionary than any other (stream of consciousness as distinctive expression of everyday experience). At the same time, an adherence to this precept has become a truism in contemporary literary criticism, exacerbated in part by a growing anxiety about the pitfalls of Eurocentrism—it would be difficult, if not impossible, to imagine, for instance, a critic like Friedman using the third-person plural to voice Antonio Candido’s opinion on the reflexive character of Latin American literatures:

We never created original frameworks of expression nor basic expressive techniques; we never created such things as Romanticism, on the level of tendencies, or the psychological novel, on the level of genres, or indirect free style, on that of writing. And while we have achieved original results on the level of expressive realization, we implicitly recognize the dependency, so much so that we never see the diverse nativisms disputing the use of imported forms, since that would be like opposing the use of the European languages we speak.[8]

Whereas Candido’s opinion may today seem somewhat disproportionate, it nonetheless forces us to confront head-on the aesthetic constraints of the periphery as shaped by the inescapable reality of capitalism’s uneven development. Capitalism’s articulation on a global scale creates the conditions of possibility for mapping peripheral literary transformation and provides the most solid basis for its periodization—the actually existing process behind what Candido refers to as “influences of various types, good and bad, inevitable and unnecessary.” While these influences are neither decidedly aleatory nor entirely incapacitating, the circumscriptions they distribute are, as Benita Parry has explicitly argued, what makes “the generic modes and stylistic mannerisms of modern peripheral literatures” legible as a unified field.[9] They are what makes, for instance, Tayeb Salih’s irrealism or Ayi Kwei Armah’s African modernism conspicuously proximate to the “would-be but never-quite modernist texts,” as Neil Larsen describes them, of the so-called Latin American Boom.[10] This does not mean that an anxiety of influence is particular to peripheral literatures or that the problem of influence is a necessary point of departure for an investigation into their stylistic proclivities.[11] Rather, it means that peripheral literatures, by reason of their position within a system that is, in Franco Moretti’s formula, “simultaneously one and unequal,”[12] are forced to negotiate in specifically situated ways with the surcharge of the inevitable and the burden of the unnecessary.

The term modernism itself does not escape this predicament. As Ericka Beckman, Oded Nir, and Emilio Sauri argue, “the operability of terms like realism, naturalism, or modernism cannot be taken for granted because of considerable historical difference between peripheral and metropolitan societies. And yet, precisely because peripheries form part of a larger unity—world capitalism—those categories also cannot be ignored.”[13] Peripheral modernism’s drama is, in this sense, the drama of its own modernist legibility, of its claim to aesthetic autonomy, which unfolds against the grain of its uneven and combined frames of reference (the “foreign form, local materials” hypothesis being just one of its possible formulations). To this we must finally add the imbrication between the construction of the modernist canon and imperialism, which projects onto the order of the aesthetic the double bind of peripheral social formations, namely that their asymmetrical relationship to the cores of the capitalist system is constituted upon mechanisms that forcibly secure the transfer of value from the periphery to the core while simultaneously reproducing the asymmetrical character of the relationship on an ever-expanding scale.

Whereas the appropriation of peripheral ingenuity for the construction of the modernist canon is a process that is well documented, leading to Blanco Aguinaga’s inescapable conclusion that modernism “is in great measure sustained by the appropriation of the productivity of the Other, as is the case of any colonial enterprise” (“On Modernism,” 7), what often escapes critical attention within modernist studies is the forceful, institutional reconversion of those same appropriated forms into a refractory aesthetic horizon for peripheral literary development. Thus the “shameless imperialism” of “the pseudotheoretical modernist operation” (15) described by Blanco Aguinaga finds its rejoinder in the inevitable and unnecessary articulation of modernism’s attributes (self-reflexiveness, denaturalization, the rejection of representation, etc.) as the literary terminus of any peripheral artwork with truly cosmopolitan, i.e. modern, aspirations. While this problem has a long-standing tradition in literary area studies, its partial occlusion within global modernist debates can be said to be at once paradoxical and inevitable, a product of what Graham Huggan characterizes as a commodified process of cultural translation: “the superimposition of a dominant way of seeing, speaking and thinking onto marginalized peoples and the cultural artifacts they produce.”[14] Following this same pattern, the retrospective generalization of certain attitudes (most notably self-reflexiveness) as quintessentially modernist throughout the mid-decades of the twentieth century, became a forceful and, for the purposes of this cluster, expressive attribute of capitalism as a world-historical process.

Thus, while we must never acquiesce, as Raymond Williams argued, to a “redefinition of the nature of art” based on supposedly “fundamental, general human ways of seeing,” a posture that only serves to obscure the dialectical relationship between art and social process, it is nevertheless necessary to interrogate the real obstacles that modernism’s hegemonic rationalization created for peripheral literatures.[15] This is not only because those complications curbed, to varying degrees, national literary trajectories—and in byzantine ways allowed for peripheral literatures to amplify and transform modernism’s ideological presuppositions—but because of the significance of those complicated histories in modeling and recounting the synchronous implementation of capitalism’s global imperatives. The Warwick Research Collective’s repudiation of “the idea . . . that the ‘world’ of world-literature is a ‘level playing field’, a more or less free space in which texts from around the globe can circulate, intersect and converse with one another,” is, consequently, a necessary point of departure for any conceptual approximation to the question of peripheral modernism, as it forces us to contend with the historicization of capitalism’s unleveling processes.[16]

It bears restating that the antagonisms produced by the “‘uneven development’ of the ideology of modernism,” as Fredric Jameson once called it, cannot be abolished by simply implementing a greater diversification of the modernist archive, if only because antagonism turns out to be a structuring principle of any system, literary or otherwise.[17] And while recent efforts to think modernism globally might have created a situation in which the term modernism is once again, as Latham and Rogers observe, “conceptually up for grabs,” (Modernism, 151) it is also worth noting that a palpable evacuation of the relation between aesthetics and politics has often accompanied the irenic partialities of many of these efforts. By contrast, the essays in this cluster defend the purchase of the peripheral to grasp the inherent structurality of the capitalist system, contributing to a growing body of scholarship concerned with the literary registration of capitalism’s scalar contradictions. As Paul Stasi has recently argued: “The accumulation of power is neither reducible to, nor separable from, the accumulation of capital; certain kinds of texts emerge in certain locations due to the structural position of those locations within the larger economic system that conditions them.”[18] A similar orientation animates Auritro Majumder’s understanding that “texts operate in and are mediated by hierarchical structures of accumulation and differentiation between the core, semi-periphery and periphery—in short, a capitalist world-system.”[19] On the one hand, the essays gathered in this cluster restate the centrality of Majumder’s proposition for the formulation of a peripheral modernism, on the other, they explicitly avoid conflating the problem of structurality with the analytical reduction of peripheral modernist artworks to a single dimension; their tendential confinement to what Pascale Casanova called the “pole of greatest heteronomy” of world literary space—something as impossible as it is undesirable.[20] On the contrary, this cluster emphasizes that severing peripheral modernism from its conflictive relationship with modernism’s hegemonic rationalizations would mean to ultimately sever it from its truly democratic potential as the literary mode capable of formally mediating, i.e. rendering thinkable, capitalism’s structure and process on a global scale.

Comparably Peripheral Terrains

The essays in this cluster actively explore the formal rabbit holes, impasses, and contradictions that make peripheral modernism legible as an aesthetic category and a unified field for literary and cultural inquiry. In “The Modernism of Magical Realism,” Tavid Mulder theorizes Latin American magical realism as a force field of contrasting cosmopolitan, national, and regional orientations that provides a uniquely peripheral account of the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Whereas the ideological frameworks of magical realism tend to affirm the periphery as a distinct cultural identity, Mulder turns to the works of José Carlos Mariátegui to argue for a conceptualization of peripheral modernism as a form of unity-in-disunity that, pulling simultaneously toward identity and crisis, can register the contradictory character of bourgeois society. Similarly, in “Ambivalent Modernism,” Nataša Kovačević examines the articulation of a socialist modernist aesthetic in postwar Yugoslavia that, embracing a formal ambivalence between modernist experimentation and realist rationality, broke away from the progressive conception of historical temporality implicit in both socialist and capitalist teleologies. Analyzing Yugoslav writers’ opposition to foreign literary models, Kovačević argues that a decolonial dimension emerges in Yugoslav literature and art, guided by the struggle to assert the right to aesthetic and national autonomy. Central to all contributions in this cluster is the question of how social commitment finds viable expression through modernist form, a problem that Kovačević examines through the “blended form” of Čedomir Minderović’s Traces of India, a collection of travel essays that produces a nonaligned aesthetic thanks to its formal oscillations and ambivalent attitude toward modern development.

Focusing on the spatiotemporal disjunctions that accompany the emergence of abstract art in Brazil, Thomas Waller’s “Importing Abstraction” introduces another fundamental predicament for the conceptualization of peripheral modernism, namely the tension between originality and imitation that follows from the international displacements of artistic forms. This problem, synthesized in the observation that in the periphery “foreign forms are always affirmed improperly,” is explored through the contrast between the aesthetic presuppositions of the historical avant-garde and the intuitionist approach to non-figurative abstraction characteristic of Brazilian neo-concretism. As in the case of Yugoslav ambivalent modernism, close attention to how rivaling forces develop into an objective problem of form serves to counteract interpretative accounts of peripheral modernist art as merely imitative or derivative. Similarly concerned with the problem of aesthetic belatedness and displacement is Ruth Jennison’s approach to the colonization of the American interior and the spatial production of a “periphery in the core,” where emancipatory projects emerge, informed by the combination between residual and emergent forms of resistance to capitalism. Through close readings of Richard Wright’s “Transcontinental” and Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead, Jennison recasts the combined and uneven American interior as a social space where modernism’s presuppositions affirm political solidarities with the struggles of Black and Indigenous peoples. The textual adjacencies in these poems, as Jennison argues, “create political proximity across global distance” and reorient modernist technique toward political intervention and revolutionary struggle.

While this introduction has focused on the theoretical elements that bind the essays of the cluster together, it is useful to note that each contribution approaches the problem of peripheral modernism in a uniquely situated way, readapting the category to explore questions of cultural identity, nonalignment, geographic scale, and aesthetic judgement. Despite the inevitable analytical variegation at stake in each author’s use of the term, it is my hope that the intersecting questions raised by these essays—their coincident gravitation toward the patterns and disjunctions of peripheral aesthetics, as well as their dynamic use of the category to signal both compatibility and conflict across geographies and media—will help delineate a comparative terrain to advance a theory of peripheral modernism.