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

Autor: Auritro Majumder
Rok vydání: 2017
Předmět:
Zdroj: Interventions. 19:781-796
ISSN: 1469-929X
1369-801X
DOI: 10.1080/1369801x.2017.1348244
Popis: 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 fro...
Databáze: OpenAIRE