THE CASE FOR PERIPHERAL AESTHETICS: FREDRIC JAMESON, THE WORLD-SYSTEM AND CULTURES OF EMANCIPATION

Abstract

Since its 1986 publication, Fredric Jameson’s essay “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” (TWL) has been widely perceived as the master theorist’s colossal misstep; postcolonial scholars, following the Indian Marxist Aijaz Ahmad, have criticized TWL as a singular intervention that exemplifies metropolitan parochialism about third-world peripheries. Breaking with such consensus, this essay offers a postcolonial–materialist defence of the essay’s two central, conceptual categories: national allegory and third-world/peripheral aesthetics. I demonstrate that their theoretical basis lies in the differential calibration of modernism, and the public–private ratio, in the peripheries of the capitalist world-system. These abstractions are in fact engendered by the unevenly universalizing tendencies of capital itself. The first part of the essay illustrates how a reconsideration of TWL is vital to current theories of world literature, which borrow much and often without acknowledgement from older materialist frameworks of combined and uneven development, dependency and world-system analysis. In the second half, I argue that key mid-twentieth-century cultural landmarks, such as Mao Zedong’s Yenan lectures on literature, and Glauber Rocha’s “Aesthetics of Hunger” cinema manifesto, foreshadow TWL’s argument. Not only do these texts from Asia, Latin America etc. illuminate the anti-imperial, peripheral “roots” of Jameson’s formulations, they also trace a largely forgotten history, and corpus, of peripheral modernism, differing in key aspects from Euro-American modernism. The essay highlights the key concern of peripheral aesthetics, namely that culture is a site of emancipatory struggle.

• Aesthetics
• Jameson
• Fredric
• materialism
• periphery
• world-system

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Timothy Brennan, Sreya Chatterjee, Sandeep Banerjee and the anonymous reviewer of Interventions for their comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

Notes

1 The best example of this approach is the work of Brazilian literary critic Roberto Schwarz. Schwarz (1992) advocates that “cultural history has to be set in the world perspective of the economics and culture of the left, which attempt to explain our ‘backwardness’ [in Brazil] as part of the contemporary history of capital and its advances” (16, original emphasis).

2 Alongside Benjamin, Georg Lukács’ discussion of allegory in Dante and Goethe is also noteworthy in this regard; Lukács sees the Divine Comedy, as well as Faust, as embodying the discontinuous, incommensurable sensibilities of distinct historical eras.

3 See Brennan’s (2006) discussion of the shortcomings of contemporary intellectuals and especially the notion of “cosmopolitanism” in the United States, “Cosmo-Theory”.

4 Kang (2000) illustrates Mao’s significant contribution towards a peripheral aesthetics. Kang rightly bemoans the “ahistorical and idealist tendencies of certain western Left academicians or anarcho-liberalist ‘post-Marxists’”. His commentary is concise and unambiguous:

In China studies, the postcolonialist paradoxical debunking of a radical revolutionary [Maoist] legacy from which s/he finds a mirror image of her/himself, only obfuscates the real question of coming to grips with the complex legacy of Chinese revolution and revolutionary hegemony. (xiv–xv)

5 In her careful survey of Woolf’s fiction and writings on Russia, such as the novels Orlando and The Voyage Out, and the essay “The Russian Point of View”, Protopopova (2006) finds that Russia alternatively serves as a “savage”, ahistorical space inhabited by “mysterious natives” or as the projected “symbol” of Woolf’s own psychologized, “modernist sensibilities”. Either way, the contemporary events after the Bolshevik Revolution, of which Woolf was hardly unaware, are seldom given much significance.

6 I have in mind both Carpentier’s (1995) well-known essay and Césaire (2000). Contemporaneous to these accounts is Lukács’s (1980) magisterial polemic.